Closed borders kill people

16 Comments

Open borders advocates have long seized philosophical hypotheticals to argue that open borders would, quite literally, save lives. Restrictionists tend to jump through all kinds of hoops to argue that preventing someone from earning an honest living isn’t economically equivalent to robbing that person of some of their income — which, in extreme cases, can obviously cause death. But it isn’t hard, at all, to find cases where closing the borders quite literally kills people.

Historically, developed countries have welcomed political refugees, knowing that to turn someone away would likely lead to their death. We regret and condemn cases where the civilised world has failed to do this, such as when the 1940s US denied visas to European Jews (perhaps the most famous victim of American oppression here being Anne Frank). West Germany welcoming East German escapees or the US welcoming Vietnamese refugees come to mind; even today, the US near-automatically grants residency to Cuban refugees.

While reading an article in the New York Times today about the corner of the world where the borders of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran meet, all I could think about was the power of open borders to transform people’s lives. I don’t know many people who would find it appealing to live in Iran, yet there are literally people willing to run the risk of death just to get into Iran (over 2 million of them, by one estimate from the article). That’s the immense power of the place premium.

I don’t have extremely strong views on Iran, but after reading the article, I don’t think I had a very positive impression of the country — to put it mildly. The way it treats undocumented Afghan workers, literally murdering people for crossing a line someone drew on a map, is unconscionable. Yet almost everything about Iranian immigration policy, short of murdering immigrants, resembles immigration policy in almost every country of the world. What makes Iranian immigration policy barbaric, but US or European immigration policy civilised?

Something else to chew on: Australia’s policy of jailing immigrants has backfired, because Indonesians are willing to risk death on the open seas to immigrate to Australian jails. The place premium’s existence and power are undeniable: people risk life and limb to get into Iran. They risk life and limb to get into an Australian jail, because that’s still a better life than what they had before. If closing the borders isn’t equivalent to taking food away from a starving man, it’s pretty damn close — especially when you need to literally kill some people to keep the borders closed.

Honduras

1 Comment

Bad news from Honduras:

The Honduran Supreme Court has ruled unconstitutional a project to build privately-run cities, with their own police and tax system.

The “model cities” project was backed by President Porfirio Lobo, who said it would attract foreign investment and create jobs

By 13 votes to one, Supreme Court judges decided that the proposal violated the principle of sovereignty.

Demonstrators celebrated the decision outside the court in Tegucigalpa.

“This is great news for the Honduran people. This decision has prevented the country going back into a feudal system that was in place 1,000 years ago,” said lawyer Fredin Funez.

The government proposal to create some 20 “special development zones – as the new cities were officially called – was approved by Congress last year.

The Supreme Court has now ruled that the law approved in Congress is unconstitutional, as it violates the territorial integrity of Honduras, as well as the sovereignty of the government.

“I am sad. All the Congress wanted was to give jobs to all Hondurans,” said Congress speaker Juan Orlando Hernandez.

Prior to this, there was a kerfuffle when Paul Romer, the great economic theorist and leading promoter of the idea of charter cities, made a stormy exit from the project which he had earlier been promoting, after a deal was made with a private development group without his knowledge. His complaint seems to be lack of transparency. For what it’s worth, that’s kind of my impression, too. MGK Group needed to proclaim to the world, and to Hondurans, what they were going to do, fill their minds with dreams of the future, sell the plan. Michael Strong, head of the MGK development group which would have built the charter cities, seems to have wanted to build a free-market paradise. But it seems to me they didn’t offer enough detail. Would more detail, faster, more publicly, have reassured the Supreme Court? What if MGK Group had managed to make the project popular enough to mobilize their own demonstrators in the street? MGK Group defends their lack of transparency thus: Continue reading Honduras →

Open borders and climate change

7 Comments

Could climate change be good? Wikipedia’s article on “Regional effects of climate change” lists a wide variety of effects of climate change, all of which seem to be bad. That seems odd. Unless the world’s present climate system somehow represents the perfect ideal, presumably climate change should be good for some reasons. Why should we think the present climate system to be ideal? Is it because this is the climate humans evolved in, and humans are perfectly adapted to it? But that can’t be the case, because humans spread to most of the world rather quickly, and too recently for evolution to have altered us much. For the theistically inclined, one might say that God, in His wisdom, made the world ideal for man. But in the Bible, God tells Adam and Eve: “Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it.” In other words, we have divine endorsement to alter the environment. We certainly have altered the environment greatly since we came on the scene. We’ve been doing that for thousands of years. We’ve already adapted to many environments, from tropical rainforests to arctic tundras. Why should it be a problem to adapt to a world a few degrees warmer? Studies show that global warming will benefit some regions. Some plants in arid regions might benefit. One supposes that places like Canada, Russia, even New England, which are uncomfortably cold, could flourish in a warmer world.

Aside from the ethics of whether we have a “right” to alter the natural environment (I won’t explore that), much of the problem with climate change is that even if it doesn’t reduce the capacity of Earth as a whole to sustain a growing population, it probably will make some regions less amenable to human flourishing. The most vulnerable country in the world to global warming may be Bangladesh, a country with a dense and rapidly growing population which could see 11 percent of its land inundated if seas rose by 1 meter. It seems likely that the burden of adapting to climate change will fall disproportionately on poor countries that played a rather small role in causing it. Suppose that, as seems likely, other countries are benefiting, in the sense that their environments are becoming more conducive to agriculture, more capable of sustaining large populations. If Bangladeshis were allowed to emigrate to these countries, that probably wouldn’t reconcile them to the loss of their homes, but it would do much to prevent possible humanitarian catastrophes.

It stands to reason that open borders should be part of the environmentalist agenda. If we are altering the climate, we need to adapt to that, and migration, moving from the areas most damaged by environmental change to the areas most favored by it, is one of the most powerful instruments of adaptation available. If we want to avoid altering the climate, there will be some regions where human beings can live with the least damaging environmental footprint. We should make it possible for them to do so (and then maybe arrange a Pigovian tax regime to encourage them to).

UPDATE: A column titled Moving to Greenland in the face of global warming by Klaus Desmet and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg for VOX makes some related points.

Whoever he is, the next US President will be wrong on immigration

7 Comments

Josh Barro of Bloomberg has a good piece on 5 terrible policies which both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney endorsed in last night’s US presidential debate. My only complaint about Barro’s article: its obvious failure to mention immigration policy. The immigration status quo, not just in the US but in virtually every modern nation-state, is regressive, degenerate, and immoral. Maybe this universality makes it unremarkable in the US, but keeping the borders closed certainly qualifies as one of the “Worst Ideas Romney and Obama Agree On,” per Barro’s headline. Continue reading Whoever he is, the next US President will be wrong on immigration →

Lifting the Cuban Travel Ban Is Good for U.S.

4 Comments

This piece originally appeared at the Cato-at-Liberty blog here and is reproduced with permission from the author.

This morning the Cuban government announced reforms of its 52 year old travel ban. In mid-January, the Cuban government will cease requiring exit visas and invitations from foreign nationals so Cubans can leave. It’s unclear how the new plan will be applied in practice. The Cuban government’s announcement might not be as welcome as people hope, but this is a substantial change in rhetoric. My colleague Juan Carlos Hidalgo wrote about how such an approach would affect Cubans here.

Assuming the travel ban is mostly or entirely lifted, this policy change will also affect Americans in numerous ways.

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

Because of their unique legal-immigration status, the Cuban-born population living in the United States was excluded from estimates of unauthorized immigrants and very few of them are likely in violation of any immigration laws.

Second, the United States is the number one destination abroad for Cubans. Additionally, nearly 60 percent of Cuban-Americans were born abroad compared to less than 40 percent for all other Hispanic groups. Cubans tend to be older, more likely to own homes and businesses, more geographically concentrated in Florida, more educated, wealthier, and have fewer children than other Hispanic immigrant groups. They are overwhelmingly positive for the American economy.

Third, Florida has been the main destination and beneficiary of Cuban immigration since the 19th century century. Ybor City, a section of Tampa, owes its birth and development to Cuban and Spanish-born entrepreneurs like Ignacio Haya and Vincente Martinez Ybor who made the city a cigar manufacturing powerhouse by the early 20th century. For generations, Ybor City was known as “Little Havana.”

In addition to the tobacco trade, Cuban-American entrepreneurs in Ybor City also specialized in legal services, accounting offices, real estate development companies, and advertising. Restaurants have probably had the biggest impact on the habits of Americans. The Columbia Restaurant, currently Florida’s oldest restaurant, was opened by Cuban- born Casimiro Hernandez in 1905. It started as a small corner cafe serving authentic Cuban sandwiches and café con leche and has since expanded to seven other locations.

The situation was similar in Miami where Cubans excelled at opening small businesses and revitalizing large sections of the city that had begun to decay. Ever since the earliest Cubans came to America, they haven’t wasted any time in their pursuit of the American dream.

Fourth, Cuban immigration to Florida has not lowered the wages for Americans working there. According to an authoritative peer-reviewed paper written by Berkeley labor economist David Card, the sudden immigration of 125,000 Cubans on the famed Mariel boatlift in 1980 increased the size of Miami’s total labor market by 7 percent and the size of its Cuban workforce by 20 percent.

For non-Cubans in Miami with similar skills, wages were remarkably stable from about 1979-1985. A massive and sudden increase in labor supply did not lower wages for Americans or increase their unemployment. Miami businesses rapidly expanded production to account for the influx of new consumers and workers and Cuban immigrants started businesses with a gusto, thus creating their own employment opportunities.

Cuba’s reform of the travel ban could reignite Cuban immigration. In 2011, roughly 40,000 Cubans gained legal permanent residency and refugee status in the United States. That number could increase dramatically if the Cuban government truly got out of the way and let its people move toward relative freedom and economic opportunity.

Beginning in mid-January, assuming U.S. policy does not change (an unlikely scenario given that neither political party wants to upset the politically influential Cuban community in South Florida), we could witness a large new wave of Cuban immigration to the United States.

Despite entertaining movies like Scarface, the long run consequences of the Marial boatlift have been good for Americans, Cuban immigrants, and Florida. Cuban-Americans reveal a pattern of success and achievement similar to other contemporary immigrant groups and those in our country’s past. Immigrants are more successful in the United States than their former countrymen left behind. American capitalist institutions are the main cause of this, but it’s also because immigrants are overwhelmingly committed to economic advancement and the hard work that takes.

If Cuba truly lifts the travel ban, it will be a blessing for all Cubans. Many of them will likely immigrate to the United States, which will also be good for us.

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