Vipul Naik and the Priority of Open Borders

Frankly, in the 1000 things that the government should change to be more libertarian, open borders is number 750 at best. And doing it too early could kill other libertarian initiatives by drawing in foreigners who’ll vote anti-libertarian, and unless you buy “increase the contradictions”-style logic from Communist revolutionaries (which surprisingly large numbers of libertarians do buy into), you may be more interested in “libertarianism in one country” versus “transnational” libertarianism (to pursue the Communist analogy of libertarian nationalist “Stalinists” versus the transnational “Trotskyites”).

Also, politics matters, and radical open-borders positions aren’t exactly political winners, particularly if the economy isn’t perfect. If you’re interested in at least occasionally winning votes instead of just arguments, you have to consider this angle.

“First World governments deny people from the Third World the basic human right to sell their labor to willing First World buyers.”

Because those Third World people, once they are here, will consume a lot of social services and vote for ever-higher income taxes on me, thus infringing on *my* right to sell my labor. Romney would have a better chance of being elected if the Hispanic share of the electorate were smaller.

I am surprised by some libertarians’ self-righteousness about open borders.

I think your case would be stronger if you would add to it one of these two things:

1) Explain why your line of argument does not, as a side-effect, do away with the entire rational basis for nation-states and citizenship.

2) If you cannot do (1), explain why the concepts of nation-state and citizenship are bad in themselves, and should be done away with.

The obvious consequences of “denationalization” that are consequent in your previous arguments for the illegitimacy of restrictions on immigration present a high bar to jump over–nothing less than the eradication of nations as currently understood–without making the case that nations, borders, citizenship, voting, etc, are bad things anyway.

Elevating the fight for Open Borders to number one on the agenda strikes me as more moral narcissim than pragmatism. It is not as if the other 749 causes (to cite, say, @Foobaristra) for which we could be fighting are such slam dunks that the crusade for Opens Borders is the only cause worth of the mega Libertarian Brain (and Heart?). Let’s win the fight for global free trade in goods (and capital), and many of the benefits of Open Borders would be delivered. Let’s win the fight for reducing the size of government and of government dependency, and the contributions of even the poorest of immigrants will be more widely appreciated and their arrival better received.

I think it’s worse when the US government blows up foreigners with missiles fired from flying robots, rather than preventing them from selling their labor here. So I think antiwar activism is more important than immigration policy.

In Bryan’s defense, he talks about pacifism a lot too.

Bryan, you have all the evidence in front of you that you should blog about immigration more, right in this very comment section. To wit, people are completely ignoring that you’ve already proposed more humane, pro-immigration alternatives to strict bans that would address most or all of the immigration negatives they point out. And some readers seem to think that we’ll gain most of the benefits to immigration by getting rid of tariffs, even though you’ve already shown that economists’ estimates of the deadweight losses from capital and goods restrictions are massively dwarfed, over 10 times, by restrictions to immigration.

Worse still, your readers still seem to think that the standard arguments against immigration have substantial relevance in light of this fact, when in fact they need to show not only that immigration has negative qualities but that those negative qualities collectively outweigh DOUBLE WORLD GDP!

If you have to repeat yourself, so be it. This is the single most important issue in economics, and it needs more exposure! To start, how about a post on emotional saliency versus empirical relevancy? That would be a nice place to point people who think immigration could possibly be as low as 750th on a list of government policy outrages.

(However, I agree with Bob Murphy that anti-war activism is probably the more important political cause.)

Holtz,

That hyperlink is a joke.

“Open borders between America and the rest of the world will only be feasible when the differences between America and the world are as small as, say, the differences between America and Canada, or between Alabama and Florida.”

I mean, aside from the lack of proof,

Also, Caplan doesn’t “handwave” this away. It falls under the cultural argument (I think, TK is vague on what he means by “different”).

“If hordes of poor immigrants would cause an intolerable expense for public charity”

Yeah Caplan didn’t address this either. /Sarcasm

“then they would cause a similar expense for private charity. To the extent that private charity doesn’t replace public, it will result in massive downward pressure on unskilled wages and levels of mass squalor unseen outside the Third World.”

Right, because people would keep immigrating even if their life in America would be the same as their life in Haiti. The poorest people on earth would spend thousands of dollars on a ticket to nothing.

“It’s just not intellectually credible to maintain that conditions and policies on opposite sides of a border could never vary so widely as to make unrestricted immigration infeasible.”

Well, good thing no one is hinging their immigration argument on that.

Given irrational voters’ anti-foreign and anti-market bias (see Caplan), it is hard enough to try and get support for freer trade in goods, let alone freer movement of people. Notice that both candidates for President are pointing out how tough they are/will be on foreign goods. Both also state they are tough on illegal migration, while not particularly proposing much in the way of eased legal migration. (I could be wrong here; I tend to avoid exposure to political ads.)

I, for one, have come to agree with Caplan’s open borders plans, on the condition that new immigrants don’t receive welfare benefits, social security, voting rights, etc., nor do their descendants for three generations. Furthermore, conviction for a commonlaw felony (e.g. rape, arson, mayhem) should result in an automatic deportation and/or execution, with no statutory habeas corpus available.

@Swimmy

The problem with all of Bryan’s “pro-immigration alternatives to strict bans” is that they are inconsistent with his philosophical case for the right of unrestricted immigration.

I prefer to concentrate on his arguments rather than his plans, because they have a better (if inadequate) foundation.

I’m as solidly libertarian as anyone I know, but open borders is not among my highest priorities. My top concerns are paring back our massive national government and restoring our rights and liberties. Opening our borders before paring back government would give longer life to Social Security and Medicare by adding more workers who will be forced to pay into those Ponzi schemes.

Bob Murphy:

Almost as if in direct response, Nathan Smith has a new post on the Open Borders blog arguing that open borders will contribute to world peace: http://openborders.info/blog/deepening-the-peace/

Interesting. My blog is almost entirely space technology, space business, and space policy focused, but when I let my libertarian show, I think most of my non-space policy posts are about immigration…

~Jon

Feeling sorry for the third worlders isn’t exactly on the agenda of the typical American (and why should it be), but paying lip service to the plight of the third worlders is very much up the alley of progressives.

Whenever I hear an argument that appeals to utilitarianism I observe that whosoever says he would hold a child in the fire to end malaria, will hold a child’s face in the fire and entirely forget he was trying to end malaria, a prediction amply confirmed by experience.

Utilitarianism is not within the human potential, not part of human nature.

Which leads me to predict that whosoever proposes to destroy America to the benefit of third worlders, will destroy America and forget he intended to benefit third worlders.

Why is the third world third world? By and large, it is because at one time or another they voted for third world type governments – usually with the result that was the last election for some considerable time.

Explain why your line of argument does not, as a side-effect, do away with the entire rational basis for nation-states and citizenship.

Open borders does not at all do away with the rational basis for nation-states or citizenship.

Nation-states are simply the sovereign entities that claim territories. And all that sovereignty means is that the state has exclusive control over the laws on its side of the border. That is neither violated nor eliminated by having one of those laws recognize the individual rights of migration, residence, and labor of people regardless of where they were born.

And citizenship is nothing more than the mechanism by which a government entitles people to elect itself and hold office in itself. Allowing people to live and work where they choose regardless of where they were born does not violate or eliminate citizenship. In particular, states can have wide open borders without having wide open naturalization.

Seriously, open borders was the worldwide norm prior to World War I. And yet nation states and citizenship both survived just fine. Why wouldn’t they?

@MikeP

In particular, states can have wide open borders without having wide open naturalization.

I think the disconnect involves the distinction between what states can do as opposed to what states are likely to do.

The Democratic Party in the US is chomping on the bit to convert Hispanics into as reliable and reflexive Democrat voters as African Americans. They may soon succeed. The option to have a large pool of potential Democrat voters inhabit, work, and pay taxes in the US without being given voting rights will be fought tooth and nail by the Democratic Party.

We “could” open borders without giving full citizenship, but there is clearly a powerful political will that would make sure we couldn’t. It’s not a real option.

Would it be fair to say that pro-immigration advocates don’t see the political animal in immigrants and anti-immigrant advocates don’t see the economic animal in immigrants?

How about talking about the injustice of attempting to punish the parents by going after their children. Growing up here their entire life, but not being able to enter the legal labor market doesn’t just hurt their income. It destroys their dignity and self esteem. At least it did in the case I’m most familiar with.

1 possible reason libertarians and libertarian oriented politicians don’t focus more on free borders

• the right generally oppose immigration and feels strongly about this. By voicing open borders libertarians are likely to offend(in lack of a better word) those very same groups of voters and politicians they usually have lots of common ground with.

  Any thoughts?

Philo, I’d like to know if you have a reference or link for your interesting claim that “in the early 80s, when the South African government was under heavy international pressure to end apartheid, its propaganda response was (in part) that the U.S. was pursuing its own apartheid (“separate development”) vis-à-vis Mexicans.” If so, I could probably include it under the global apartheid page of the Open Borders website. Thanks!

ThomasL,

it is difficult to justify under the rights basis of the argument used for free immigration and used for democracy.

Rights are largely orthogonal to democracy. Democracy may be the best way to guarantee rights, but there is no unalienable right to vote. In contrast, there are unalienable rights to travel, residence, labor, and association — rights that are being abrogated by democracy in the US today.

How can we justify creating, as others suggested, penalties which apply more harshly to them than other residents?

I disagree with those proposals. But immigrants do face a much harsher penalty than citizens face: deportation.

I was quoting Bryan Caplan in my earlier comment on the incompatibility of open borders with national democracy…

Really? Got a link?

Why are people arguing the question as an American political one?
In other words, why is the question argued as whether the proposal is beneficial for the citizens of the US? Surely the academic question is whether it will be beneficial for the world or not. I don’t see any reason why a neutral academic analysis of a policy should put more importance on the welfare of US passport holders than others. I understand that an American politician would speak to his electorate and would discuss just the effect of the policy on citizens. But surely this is a higher level of discourse. I hope this is an academic discussion, and the importance of all individuals involved is equal. If you want to argue here that immigration restriction is “a good thing”, then I think you have to make the case that the world, and not just the US are better off because of it.

It never ceases to surprise me how little faith self described libertarians have in free markets, especially when it comes to a free market in labor. It seems to expose everyone from the closeted Republican, who can’t actually bring himself to believe that free markets are a good thing, to the outright racists, who feel immigrants are genetically incapable of not leeching off society’s makers.

This is one reason libertarians are taken seriously by nearly nobody outside the movement. When it comes down to the bottom line, “libertarian” is all too often code word for, at best, “closeted conservative”.

Actually, Brian’s arguments for open borders have been absolutely crushed in the comments to his earlier posts on the subject (read them from the links in the side column).

Fundamentally, the problem is that Brian and other open-borders advocates are relentlessly anti-empirical on this question, which I think a “libertarian economist” should be ashamed of. Brian’s writings about immigration resemble sophomore Marxism more than anything else.

First, the propagandistic appeal to pure emotion– Brian asks us to act out of empathy, not rational considerations, based on how we fantasize that foreigners feel about immigration restrictions. A true student of Josef Goebels, Brian starts his essays by asking readers to imagine themselves or their kin forced into exile– expelled from their homes, a very emotional matter– rather than cooly considering the actual question, which is whether the US should tell low-quality would-be immigrants– foreigners with no connection to or positive claim on the US– to just stay home or go somewhere else because the US doesn’t want them. (To Robert Murphy’s point, I think it is absolutely wrong for the US to attack foreigners in their homes, but that really is qualitatively different than simply leaving them alone there– good fences make good neighbors.)

Second, his oft-repeated and empirically-wrong assumption that all humans are the same, their behavior simply molded by the nearly-immutable “institutions” which happen to govern society in one geographic place or another. This too, is crudely Marxist. Brian claims that immigration to the US would have no effect on US “institutions,” therefore no effect on the society which current Americans have built and enjoy, apart from driving down wages for a small segment of the population. This is nearly insane. “Institutions” are produced by the people who live under them. If you alter the people you alter the institutions. All the analyses showing that world GDP would double or whatever if there were no restrictions on migration are based on the idiotic assumption that advanced societies can instantly absorb all the world’s low-productivity people while maintaining constant marginal productivity. Such analyses are much less intellectually defensible than the “static analysis” of effects of changes in Income tax rates (raising rates will raise revenue without affecting behavior) which libertarian economists always deride when American leftists proffer them.

If “institutions” were really independent of the people expected to implement and embody them, then libertarian economists ought to have found a way of replicating “good institutions” from groups that have them to groups that don’t. They haven’t and never will until they recognize the evolved bases of human behavior. A small number of low-IQ/low-future-time-orientation/high-violence people can be encysted and managed by the force of “institutions” maintained and embodied by a large population of more intelligent, better behaved people. But a large population of low-productivity people can be well-managed by a smaller group of high-productivity people only if the latter use great force– quite against libertarian principles. Historical examples are usually indexed under “colonial oppressor regimes.” If, like proper libertarians, we abjure the initiation of coercion, we must wait for natural selection to alter the gene pool of low-productivity populations to the point that they adopt “good institutions” on their own.

Open immigration would destroy the “good institutions” of the US, so libertarian calls for open immigration are basically suicidal. How long would the average American libertarian last in, say, Pakistan? Few Americans want to move to Pakistan–why should they want Pakistan to pack its bags and move to America? More to the point, why should they even permit such a horrible thing? Immigration restrictions are really perfectly Libertarian: they are simply self-defense by cooperating individuals. (E.g., should you have to wait until Eastern European Gypsies squat on your farm? Shouldn’t you and your neighbors just keep them out of the country altogether? Sure, that is statistical reasoning. Of course it is; statistical reasoning is the basis of economic productivity, the hallmark of the rational animal, the foundation of science. When a libertarian economist tells you to eschew statistical reasoning he surrenders his own claim to the mantle of “Reason.”)

Third, intellectual dishonesty (or at best, wilful blindness). Like his hero Julian Simon, Brian favors “lying with statistics.” He’s happy to average Sergey Brin and George Soros in with Haitian boat people and Guatemalan vegetable pickers to claim that the “average immigrant” pays more in taxes than he collects in social spending. That is tantamount to a lie because the distribution is severely bimodal. Brian and his friends tell us third-world immigrants are less criminal on average than natives. That is perfectly true and perfectly misleading, becase the average child and grandchild and great-grandchild of that third world immigrant is much more criminal than the average native. Brian’s incomplete claim is tantamount to a lie because he neglects basic statistics– reversion toward the mean– individual immigrants are highly selected, but their offspring revert toward the average for their parents’ populations of origin. Not so much Brian (he’s been taught better by commenters) but his cheering section keeps claiming that immigrants don’t absorb social spending funded by taxes on natives (and inflation which destroys natives’ savings). It is tiresome to keep refuting these claims, which are sustained by mendacity only, such as the falsehood that immigrants are “not eligible” for welfare (they are, based on their childrens’ eligibility, and individual immigrants are often eligible for programs less famous than TANF), or omitting to count public spending on immigrant’s children (including public schools, free breakfasts and lunches, etc. “Free” means to the immigrant, not to taxpayers). Immigration boosters always trumpet that immigrants pay payroll taxes, but rarely discount the refundable EITC payments they obtain. Finally, immigration boosters lie by misdirection, constantly talking about the rare immigrant from some low-IQ hellhole who graduates from Columbia and becomes a heart surgeon, who is in fact a 3- or 4-sigma outlier.

In the real world, as opposed to the purely hypothetical world of libertarian ethics so rarefied that they sound almost Marxist, immigration is a phenomenon with externalities going far beyond the narrow formula of a willing worker for a willing employer. Those externalities harm others in proportion to the number of immigrants and the groups from which they come (for example, white refugees from Rhodesia and South Africa have assimilated into the prosperous segment of US society– there is virtually no chance that people from the more numerous ethnic groups in those countries would do so).

The externalities imposed by immigrants are so severe that they justify defensive action against immigration. Libertarians who worry that immigration restrictions constitute “aggression” against foreigners should relax– unwanted immigration constitutes aggression against the native population, and restrictions, even based as they may be on statistical inference rather than individual consideration, are defensive and therefore morally acceptable even for libertarians. A political philosophy should not be a suicide pact, and any philosophy which seems to demand complete self-abnegation– such as Brian’s demand for open borders– has obviously got a fatal flaw somewhere inside.

@MikeP

It isn’t enough to point to examples when immigration was more open.

Bryan’s argument for immigration as a right forceloses the ability of a country to prohibit immigration even in principle.

That has definite implications on the understanding of borders and national sovereignty that are not present simply by pointing to times when immigration was more or less open.

Bryan does seem to allude to such difficulties, but that I have seen never addresses them.

@Ghost of Christmas Past,

Thanks for the most illuminative and cogent summary of the economically literate arguments against open borders. I have a question, though. You write about the “double world GDP” estimates that:

All the analyses showing that world GDP would double or whatever if there were no restrictions on migration are based on the idiotic assumption that advanced societies can instantly absorb all the world’s low-productivity people while maintaining constant marginal productivity. Such analyses are much less intellectually defensible than the “static analysis” of effects of changes in Income tax rates (raising rates will raise revenue without affecting behavior) which libertarian economists always deride when American leftists proffer them.

When I was working on preparing the double world GDP page for the open borders website, I suspected that some people would have written methodological criticisms of the kind you outline. I looked in the literature and I looked on various restrictionist websites, and couldn’t find any criticism, or even discussion, of these estimates. If you are aware of a critique, whether in a paper or published online anywhere, that elaborates on the arguments you made, I’d be happy to link to it on the double world GDP page.

A lot of open borders advocates are particularly moved by the “double world GDP” type estimates, so a convincing demonstration that these estimates are grossly overstated would be a significant contribution to the debate. [Personally, I would still support open borders, but my belief about their *relative importance* would be affected by a convincing critique of “double world GDP” type estimates]