Caplan On Immigration

The fundamental question is whether or not the citizens of a country have any right to restrict immigration under any conditions whatsoever.

I say “whatsoever” because many libertarians qualify the right to immigrate with their own restrictions, such as no communicable diseases, criminal records, or ties to terrorist groups.

I find those restrictions unconvincing. If it would be wrong to deport someone to country X for any of those things, surely it is equally wrong to condemn them to remain in country X for them.

Equally important is the question of where someone derived the right to restrict on those grounds (but presumably not others). It is as if they were unquestionable revelation–
objectively right while any other restrictions are objectively
wrong, rather than acknowledging that even the possibility of restriction involves arbitrariness (and therefore a kind of right to discretion by _somebody_).

My view would tend toward property rights–citizens own their country and derive the right to control immigration from that ownership. That, as a concept, is no more or less arbitrary than the idea of personal property.

And like personal property, you may be right that I use my property unfairly, that it could be put to a better use, and that I might even benefit if I changed my policies. However, it is still mine to do with as I please, not yours to take.

Wait, is Bryan’s argument seriously that being born in Mexico is so hellish and intolerable that it is a human rights violation to “force” someone to stay there?

No one is forcing Mexico to be a hellhole. This country didn’t cause, and it’s not our responsiblity to change it. This is a freakishly backhanded attempt at nationbuilding, if you think about it.

People can certainly resolve being born into a “horrible life” by moving somewhere else, but there is no reason that that somewhere else has to be the US or that we are “consigning” or “forcing” anyone to have a horrible life by not allowing them to immigrate here.

They could, I don’t know, try changing their own country through votes or riots or social upheaval or hard work. Immigrants certainly have no issues organizing and protesting here. Why not in Mexico?

ThomasL, even if I accepted your argument that citizens own “their” country and can use it irrationally if “they” please your argument that it lead to allowing immigration still fails because it assumes citizens are unanimous. I “own” my country and want to let more people in. If you try to stop me, how are you any less a thief than me?

Furthermore, what about individual property rights? If I own a factory and an apartment building and want to fly in people to peacefully live and work there, someone who tried to stop me would be violating my property rights. Unless you think nations have a right to arbitrarily override property rights, you’d be forced to let me admit those people, even if they were foreign.

ThomasL, I recommend you listen to Arnold Kling and “lose the we.” There is no such thing as “we” or “they,” choosing to identify or not identify with total strangers based on social labels they have no control over is silly. There is no “us” and “them.”

Open immigration = nation building?

That’s a new one.

@Steve Z.
I’m sure he doesn’t give all his money to charity: I’ve been in his house and he has an awesome collection of CDs and an awesome house. You’re right that he is allowing people to live on $1 a day, as are you and as am I. But allowing is not the same as forcing. He’s advocating that the U.S. government not use force to keep them in that situation.

I can understand how Bryan lecture could fire up the home team, but as someone who favors restricted immigration, I just don’t see how its persuasive to people who favor restricted immigration (ie the majority). Most of the examples seem like strawmen. Americans are different than Haitian. American’s built America, Haitian’s didn’t. People invest in America’s commons because their descendants will benefit. If anyone can claim that benefit, then you destroy the incentive to invest.

Honestly Bryan’s lecture and to call it a “homerun”, just sounds crazy to me.

@Evan

(part one)

Shareholders own companies through their stock, are you implying that every shareholders’ vote must be unanimous in order to be valid? If not, aren’t they abusing the dissenting shareholder’s rights to direct the company as they see fit? (Rights no less valid than the affirming shareholders.)

“We” is the only pronoun that fits on certain decisions involving multiple participants.

I’d as well make the argument in a monarchy so I could specifically say “he” or “she”, but seeing as this is a republic[ish], “we” is sometimes the only way to go. If I complain that it wasn’t “me” it was “them”, the politicians, I’ve only exchanged an indistinct first person, plural, nominative “we” for an equally indistinct third person, plural, accusative “them”. It is still indistinct and it still hasn’t identified anybody. In reality, it certainly wasn’t “me” and it wasn’t even “them” either, not the least of which because most our immigration restrictions date from before this crop of politicians was even born. So who was it? Cause the decision got made. “We” is as close as I can get. Can you do better? Can you point to the single person responsible so I can blame them by name instead?

I have no problem with the idea that government is not always “we”, but in a democratically-based government, “we” (as in, “We the people…”) can be used to refer to the governing majority without implying that it meant universal support.

To wedge that in with my first statement, if, after a shareholders’ meeting, I called someone and said, “We decided to do X,” or “They decided to buy Y,” no one would assume I meant that everyone present was in favor, or necessarily even that I was in favor. Nevertheless, something was decided. So who did it? “Us.”

@Evan

(part two)

Furthermore, what about individual property rights? If I own a factory and an apartment building and want to fly in people to peacefully live and work there, someone who tried to stop me would be violating my property rights. Unless you think nations have a right to arbitrarily override property rights, you’d be forced to let me admit those people, even if they were foreign.

No, I wouldn’t. You own argument only even approaches functioning if you keep everyone locked on your own private property like some kind of sweat shop.

It doesn’t work very well even then. Living here, they will have a right to expect some services and rights (access to courts, due process, &c.) and are made subject to the laws of that jurisdiction. Being subject to the laws, in this form of government at least, they have a right to have their voices heard in the making of the laws they will be subjected to.

In order to control and make orderly that process, the existing citizens have made up a specific set of requirements and rules to gain entry, and procedures to follow to gain progressively more rights and participation in government (ie, not allowed here at all, just residing, residing and voting, &c.). Those rules are made available so that people desiring to live there will know the process to use to make it happen, and know what they are getting in to once they arrive.

BUT, the important part is, for those rules to have any validity whatsoever, the people that made them (ie, the previous and existing citizens) had to have the RIGHT to make them. If they had the right to make THOSE, they also had a right to make OTHERS, unless you can show me the a comprehensive, OBJECTIVE morality of immigration. For example, “The Lord says immigration must be free and open, except for no persons with communicable diseases, and no persons with more than 4 misdemeanors or 1 felony. Eligibility for voting and social services vests in 5 years.”

Short of immigration law based on some objective moral authority, either some entity is sovereign over that territory, and so has the right to set the restrictions they see fit, or all restrictions are in and of themselves evil and no entity posses the right to implement any restriction of any sort. That latter leads to a host of practical problems, but is morally consistent. I don’t see the consistency in any argument that admits some restrictions can be made (by whom?), but denies that others can. The reasonableness of either set of restrictions is entirely subjective, and subject to both time and circumstance. I don’t like the immigration law that exists now, but I acknowledge that “we” had the right to make it.

@Everyone

I know exactly what Ella was objecting to. The line, “[C]onsigning people by force to a horrible life,” distinctly implies that not allowing people here on their own terms is a positive action against them.

Not allowing anyone and everyone to live in my house might well “consign” them to live in a worse house–and it would be done by force if someone I hadn’t invite tried to come in. Very few libertarians would argue with my right to decide who lives in my house though, or shake their heads in moral resignation that I had “consigned… by force” that person to horrible life without the enjoyments of my easy chair and my Netflix subscription.

This argument justifies every strain of socialism imaginable. Aren’t you consigning the homeless in this country to a horrible life by not giving them a house? True enough, not giving isn’t force (though it is also no moral excuse), but if they moved into a house that was not yet occupied, or failed to pay for one, certainly removing them would require force?

Aren’t you consigning the chronically ill in this country to a horrible life by not giving them medical care? Certainly, if their illness denies them the capacity to earn enough to pay for their own care, you will either be forcing someone else to pay for them, or “consigning” them to their fate, not the less harmful to their health or wellbeing for not being done by “force”. And for all that, it may well be done by force, if they attempt to obtain care somewhere and force is not being applied to someone else instead.

Aren’t you consigning the hungry in this country to a horrible life by not giving them food? If they attempt to take it from grocery store, force will be involved.

The list goes on.

On top of all that, the phrase “consigning… by force” is poorly constructed.

Aaron, there is a reason that Mexico itself encourages exit over voice. The PTB encourage a mass exodus in order to prohibit change. That indicates that if they stayed there would be a significant societal pressure to change, no? Does knowing that Mexico encourages both its undesirables and its dissidents to emigrate affect your opinion at all?

Yes, open borders is similar to nation building because it assumes a simultaneous moral superiority and moral culpability that, frankly, doesn’t exist. We are not responsible for the rest of the world, whether it is wonderful or whether it is horrible. We didn’t make or unmake the rest of the world. We are not responsible for fixing their rotten condition and supplying everyone else a better life. Nation building and open borders have a similar, moralistic, and misguided arrogance that assumes that our blessed presence can fix other people’s horrible lives. And, conversely, if we don’t intervene, we’re evil.

No. I reject the moral argument. I am neither “forcing” nor “consigning” anyone to anything. I didn’t create their situation. They can blame God if they think it’s unfair that they were born in another country. I think it’s unfair that Paris Hilton was born rich and thin and Megan McCain got into Columbia. But they didn’t “consign” me to being middle class or “force” me to go to a state school. They are not responsible for me.

After I posted that last rather long reply I realized that it might be smart to post a shorter reply so people who didn’t feel like wading through my long one would still get the gist of it.

Here goes: I believe that the only appropriate function of government is to prevent the use of force, fraud, and similar things by using police and courts to defend against criminals and a military to defend against invading armies. All other functions it performs are not legitimate. This includes “deciding who can move and live within the geographical area it controls.” Therefore, the government has no right to keep people from moving here, unless those people happen to make up an invading army.

The morally legitimate purpose of voting is to hold government agents accountable for their actions, not to decide the ways in which the government tells other, peaceful people what to do.

Ergo, the government has no moral right to restrict immigration. It is merely a peace-keeping service (at least when it’s acting legitimately, anyway)and no more “owns” the country than you own your electric company. If it performs other, illegitimate services, you do not have a right to restrict people who consume them. Two wrongs do not make a right.

Nathan,

The problem is not just the harm that immigrants will cause themselves, but rather the harm that results from the natives’ own response to a greater population of low-skilled and low-IQ people. Namely, these native voters will altruistically vote for a greater welfare state on behalf of these new immigrants — *exactly as Bryan’s Myth of the Rational Voter thesis would suggest.*

I’ve pointed this out at least twice before in immigration posts here, but he never explains why his main scholarly idea will not apply to this case, even though the evidence is already there. Just as young people favor greater social security, and just as men favor abortion rights, the doing-OK natives will feel sorry for low-skilled immigrants and want to give them good schools, good health care, good wages… and *cough cough* affordable housing… so that they too can live the American dream.

Bryan never tires of lecturing public choice economists to ditch the view that societal harm comes mostly from interest groups pushing their own agendas, and to look at how voters who have no material interest in welfare state policies nevertheless push them strongly — out of a sense of compassion.

Thus, it doesn’t matter if we silenced immigrants, as long as the native voters will provide a voice for the voiceless, a very well established pattern in voting.

I’ve out-Caplaned Caplan on this point for… months, maybe half a year, but he still focuses on how to mitigate harm coming from immigrants themselves, when his own worldview should commit him to focusing on how native voters will beef up the welfare state on immigrants’ behalf.

Then it becomes clear that this experiment would be hopeless — voters show no desire to roll back or dismantle social security, medicare, and all the rest, so they’re not going to be any different when it’s the help-the-newcomers cause. Again, for recent unequivocal evidence, see the widespread support among voters for affordable housing for immigrants — they didn’t rise up and punish pro-immigrant politicians at the voting booth.

Caplan starts and ends with a moral argument: that refusing to invite immigrants is the same as attacking them in their homes– that America’s visa requirement is like bombing Serbia. This is at worst sheer emotional propaganda, intended and proffered to avert, rather than invite, rational consideration of the whole problem, or at best an example of insisting on the less popular answer to the trolleycar problem. I don’t see why listeners should agree to Caplan’s cart-before-horse moralistic premise before (or after) they confront the pragmatic arguments.

Natives who do not favor immigration are not promoting violence against prospective immigrants. People who attempt to immigrate in violation of the laws adopted by the natives* are the “violent” ones; they are the ones initiating force (since they could just stay home peacefully) and any force used by the native police to exclude them is purely defensive. Unwanted immigrants are invaders. Private persons may exclude trespassers from their homes. Political communities may exclude invaders from their territories.

Caplan’s example of native citizens touring abroad refused readmission to their homeland is entirely inapposite. By definition a citizen is a member of the native community with residential and political rights. To exile a citizen would be an attack on him. To exclude an alien (a non-citizen) is no attack at all. Millennia of Western law (and Eastern, I believe, though I have much less expertise on it) agree on these points. History is full of disputes over the facts in one case or another (who is or isn’t a citizen, when a given ruler may properly exile someone or admit someone else…) but rarely over the principle that some people are insiders and others outsiders, that status derives chiefly from community membership by birth, and that it is not a moral offense to merely exclude an outsider, however wrong it might be to attack him or steal from him or even leave him bleeding beside the road after someone else has assaulted him.

(Of course there are no nationalities in lifeboats, but at the same time, all emotionally and rationally mature people recognize that the “micro” rules vary with circumstances. Telling a prospective immigrant that he is not welcome merely leaves him at home in his own country, no better or worse off than before, it does not toss him out of a lifeboat.)

Really, Caplan’s gigantic strawman shows how weak his argument really is: by replacing the actual foreigners whose immigration we are supposedly considering with hypothetical natives we might cruelly and unlawfully exile, Caplan appeals to a solicitude toward members of the community on which aliens have no vested claim.

Caplan’s politico-economic arguments are full of holes and the fulsome praise they have garnered from a few like-minded economists appears to reflect confirmation bias rather than cool intellectual appraisal. In fact, one of Caplan’s arguments is nearly an own-goal and yet none of his reviewers mentions that.

@ Despite handwaving in the opposite direction, Caplan actually argues that unrestricted immigration would reduce wages severely. He specifically claims that immigration would slow to a trickle when wages (net of living costs) had fallen to the point where the marginal gain to immigrants (over their home country wages) of immigrating was approximately nil. Caplan is undoubtedly correct on this, but he glosses over the implication: immigration will slow when low-skilled labor in the US earns no more than (Caplan’s phrase) “$1 a day” and lives in the squalor of the undeveloped world. Most natives do not want their pleasant home cities to turn into Rio De Janeiro– favelas, kidnapping, police brutality, and all.

@ Caplan confuses costs and benefits. He says that the astonishing immigration influx to California was good because it pushed up real estate prices! That is bad for natives, not good for them, which is why Census data shows they’re fleeing California as immigration drives down wages and drives up housing prices in good neighborhoods– those with fewer low-skilled immigrants!** Economists usually cheer when the relative price of some good falls, typically due to improved productivity or better substitutes. Why should we analyze housing prices differently?

@ Why are “good neigborhoods” those with fewer low-skilled immigrants? Because despite Caplan’s misdirection about how most descendants of Mexican immigrants learn to speak English (sometimes poorly), the relevant facts are that the descendants of Mexican immigrants do not, even unto the 5th generation, assimilate to anywhere near native educational levels or culture. (Heck, Hispanics do much worse in high school than blacks(!).) We don’t have similar analyses of comparable data sets for immigrants from other source countries, but we do have work like Garrett Jones’ which shows that immigrants perform in the US at levels predicted by their home countries’ IQ’s. The sets of “low IQ” and “poor” countries largely overlap. No rational analyst would encourage low-IQ immigration!

(“Good neighborhoods” are those having “good schools.” It may be perverse but the accepted definition of a “good school” in America is one filled with students who make high scores on standardized tests. Students’ test scores are simply a proxy for the IQ’s of those students and their parents. Low-wage immigrants have low IQ’s and low IQ children who make low test scores, so they reduce the “goodness” of any schools they enroll in.)

@ The supposed “cultural” primacy of Los Angeles and New York depends on their respective very high IQ communities of writers, entertainers, filmmakers, financiers, etc., not on their vast supplies of low-IQ immigrants– except to the extent that cheap immigrant labor makes it possible for the cultural elites to spend a lot of time hobnobbing in restaurants staffed by low-wage immigrants while other low-wage immigrants clean their homes and watch their babies and wash their cars. (ND a cultural wasteland because it lacks immigrants? Pish. It’s an actual wasteland: population density 9.3/mile² vs. whole-US 86/mile² and Los Angeles 7000/mile²; AK has only 1.2/mile². Of course little “culture” comes from so few people. AL? Perhaps the lowest-average-IQ state? Pish on that too.) There is no evidence that low-skill immigrants contribute anything of significance to US literate culture.

@ Caplan relies heavily on Julian Simon, but Simon’s arguments have two huge holes in them (neither of which implicates Simpson’s Paradox): (1) Simon predicts that the effects of unlimited immigration would be the same as the effects of restricted immigration; (2) Simon averages the performance of high- and low-skilled immigrants in his statistical comparisons with natives. Simon wishes us to believe that we have already seen the effects of unlimited low-skilled immigration and they are benign. To the contrary, even the high rate of illegal immigration we have experienced is nothing compared to the tsunami of immigration Simon and Caplan propose to invite.

Simon’s modern statistics are drawn from an era of restricted immigration (even illegal immigration is throttled by a certain level of enforcement) of people mainly from developed countries (Mexico is a developed country by world standards). It is folly to assume much greater immigration of much lower-quality people (Haitians, anyone?) would have no different effects, especially given the other problem with Simon’s stuff: averaging the performance of very different groups of immigrants is improper. It’s like averaging my wealth with Bill Gates’ and claiming that proves I’m a billionaire. It’s very misleading to average William Shatner’s and Sergey Brin’s (or Ayn Rand’s, or Isaac Asimov’s) impacts on American culture, or tax payments, or welfare dependency with the corresponding effects of semi-literate strawberry pickers and their offspring. Simon claims immigrants pay more in taxes than they take in social spending. That is simply wrong because he does not account for social spending on immigrants’ children or costs imposed by criminal aliens, but it’s more subtly wrong because of his averaging problem. Low-skilled immigrants clearly do not pay their own way. Simon could make a strong case for selective immigration but he chose to make an intellectually-dishonest case for unlimited immigration.

(The “comparative advantage” argument for low-skilled immigration is incomplete. We know for sure that there is only weak demand for low-skilled labor, because such labor earns only low wages! Low-skilled labor is a complement to other factors of production. If the supply of low-skilled labor increases without any increase in the supply of other factors, the price (wages) of low-skilled labor will fall, possibly to zero or anyway below subsistence, which is actually negative on a macro level as unemployed laborers will draw on welfare and substitute criminal activity for employment.)

@ Caplan claims that all the objections to immigration which he is willing to consider may be obviated by simply changing American laws in a more libertarian direction, as if that were readily feasible. Low-skilled immigrants will draw social spending? “No problem– just make them ineligible,” says Caplan. Look, low-IQ immigrant children are devastating California’s government schools right now. Caplan can’t even get a school voucher plan passed, but he’s going to get all the immigrant kids thrown out of the government schools? Like Hell he will. Of all the planks in the Libertarian platform, unlimited immigration should be enacted last, since doing things the other way ’round would amount to an assault on the taxpayer of unprecedented fury.

@ Caplan’s insouciance toward the realities of politics seems linked to his disdain for the realities of the immigration question. He seems to think his reductio— that if we propose to exclude undesirable immigrants we should be equally willing to exile undesirable natives– proves his case. In fact it just makes him look silly, because most people regard the distinction between natives and prospective immigrants as crucial. Sure, some of the natives are benighted. In any large family some of the children are dull. Their parents still try to protect them! The voters wish to protect all the natives against the evils which would eventuate from unlimited immigration. Saying “there’s trouble at home already” provokes rational people to respond: “then let’s not add to it!”

*Yes, laws can be so wicked that they are void for immorality. No, neither I nor most of the people of the world think exclusionary immigration laws are so wicked.

**Really, the housing-price bubble was caused by government policy more-or-less distinct from immigration policy. Without the combination of land-use restrictions and Federal subsidies to housing purchases housing prices would not have risen so quickly, though immigrants may have added to the home-mortgage fraud problem.

[Comment removed for supplying false email address. Email the webmaster@econlib.org to request restoring this comment. A valid email address is required to post comments on EconLog.–Econlib Ed.]

agnostic–Did you listen to the part of Caplan’s speech where he said that racial diversity tends to make people less in favor of the welfare state? Do you reject this empirical evidence?

One more question to opponents of open immigration. Do you believe that internal immigration is a natural human right, akin to free speech and due process of law–that all governments should guarantee–or merely a policy choice?

There are currently countries in the world in which citizens require permission to move from one city or province to another. It seems to me that every practical or consequentialist argument used to oppose open international immigration–spread of disease, terrorism, crime, changed cultures, lowering of wages, etc.–can be used to justify such policies. I see no reason why a person from a poorer, high-crime state like Alabama has the “right” to move to (and bring down) a nicer place like New Hampshire while a person from Mexico has no such right to do the same thing in Arizona.

Drawing a distinction at the “country” line seems very artificial. Some countries, like the U.S., Singapore, Suriname, and Switzerland, have marked cultural, ethnic, linguistic, and racial diversity. Others like Japan are very homogeneous. Some are very federalist, with individual states having a variety of rights, while others have more centralized governments. Defining what is and isn’t a country just isn’t that simple. Queen Elizabeth is the nominal head of state of Scotland, Wales, and Canada, but you need a passport to travel from Scotland to Canada, but not Scotland to Wales. The EU is similar to the United States, but still far less centralized. Should it be counted as a single “country” for purposes of determining rights to immigrate? What if it gets slightly more centralized? At what point does a right to move from place A to B arise? At some point, you have to either accept that there is no fundamental right to go anywhere accept by government fiat, or draw some arbitrary line in the sand and say that on one side, travel and immigration are fundamental rights, while on the other, they’re privileges bestowed by government.

To David Henderson

@TimG,
I have a sense that you’re going just with my brief description of Bryan’s talk and not actually listening to the talk itself. True? If so, then I agree that my short description would not convince many people. I was saying that the talk was good, not that my description was sufficient.

No, I listened to Bryan’s talk and I even commented on his post, before I made my comment here. I just don’t see how Bryan’s lecture would be persuasive to most people. I commented on your post because it just sounds so crazy to me and tonedeaf to call Bryan’s lecture a “homerun” or that the he “laid out the arguments beautifully and in the right order”.

Like I said before, I can see how Bryan’s talk would fire up the home team, but to people who are against open immigration (empirically most people) just see Bryan’s talk as hand waving at straw men. See Two Turns great comment above for some examples.

The acid test: would Caplan allow unlimited immigration of Eastern European Gypsies?

We can be nearly certain Gypsies and their offspring would cost society much more than they would ever produce.

If we can keep out the Gypsies, why can’t we keep out less obnoxious people as well?

Steve rarely talks about Gypsies.

However, there seems to be a lot of unanimity about them even among the most liberal of Europeans or Americans who have been around them. Therefore I think Two Things’ question is actually a great one and nails the issue most of us have with any open borders argument.

@ Ella

Aaron, there is a reason that Mexico itself encourages exit over voice. The PTB encourage a mass exodus in order to prohibit change. That indicates that if they stayed there would be a significant societal pressure to change, no? Does knowing that Mexico encourages both its undesirables and its dissidents to emigrate affect your opinion at all?

No. Should it? I think you are describing a policy that’s relevant to a tiny percentage of immigrants. People don’t leave Mexico because they dislike the government’s policy, they leave to give their families a better life.