Tell Me the Difference Between Jim Crow and Immigration Restrictions

Immigrants generally do not end up in the United Stated because someone captured their ancestors and brought them over to be slaves. Sure, the descendants of slaves theoretically could have left, but this is a much less plausible alternative than would-be illegal immigrants staying put. I say all this who agrees with your ultimate conclusions about immigration policy, but think that the way you argue about it misunderstands the sort of objections and attitudes that supporters of immigration restrictions harbor.

This isn’t about your premise, but a general question across your posts on immigration. I think it would help the debate to clarify your terms.

Could you share precisely what a ‘citizen’ is? And consequently, what a non-citizen is?

Jim Crow benefited racist unions. Blocking immigration today benefits benevolent save-American-jobs unions. See, the difference is that unions have learned to discriminate against all groups and not just one specific group. It is a similar phenomenon concerning the treatment of Stalin and Hitler. By objective measures, Stalin seems to have been much worse. The difference is that Stalin did not discriminate; he killed everyone and anyone. Hitler made the mistake of singling out individual groups.

On a more serious note, my wife (Ukrainian) and I are trying to get her through immigration right now. Once you are confronted with the Kafkaesque structure of the bureaucracy, you cannot comprehend how we still have written on the Statue of Liberty, “Give us your poor.”

Immigrants generally do not end up in the United Stated because someone captured their ancestors and brought them over to be slaves.

Does the descendant of a slave have less control over the location of their birth than the descendant of a non-American? If not, then what’s the difference?

What about two other groups that face mandatory different treatment under the law?

1. People who commit various types of crimes. We don’t just restrict where they can live or limit their employment options, we actually imprison them. In some cases, they also lose their voting rights (temporarily or permanently).
2. Children. Children are severely limited in terms of their legal rights compared to adults. This includes significant limits on the types of jobs they can work. They also can’t vote and don’t get to decide where they wish to live (except in very limited circumstances.)

Are these equivalent to Jim Crow? If not, what characteristics separate them from both Jim Crow and treatment of illegal immigrants?

To me, even though I support largely open borders, the moral distinction is that Jim Crow applied it’s penalties based on race, whereas restrictions on illegal immigrants are based on a choice those immigrants have made. They obviously made that choice (to violate the law and enter the country) because they expect it will be better to be here, even with the restrictions, than it would be to remain where they are (or to take the time to pursue legal methods of entry). Others make different choices and never have to face the same legal consequences.

Perhaps I am likening it too much to trespassing, but in general if someone clearly communicates “You may only enter my property on the following conditions . . . ,” and I choose to violate those conditions, I should expect to be ejected from that property, and not treated as welcome guest prior to that. That’s true even if I think the conditions are ridiculous and thing the property owner should allow unconditional access.

Immigration restrictions are a lot worse than Jim Crow, as you suggest. The differences in income between Americans and non-Americans, though of course an imperfect measure since it partly depends on human capital etc., may serve as a rough gauge of the degree to which immigration restrictions are worse.

Illegal immigrants do not suffer discrimination because of a choice they made. They did not choose to be born abroad. So the “moral” distinction is spurious. That said, illegal immigrants are more like Rosa Parks than like just any black in the segregated US. They are defying unjust laws, as every human being ought to do.

They did not choose to be born abroad.

My teenage son informed me that he did not choose to be born, and therefore should not be required to do chores. I was stunned by his unassailable logic, and have permitted him to drop out of school, drink, drive my car whenever he wants, and play video games all day long.

@Gabriel Weil, “Sure, the descendants of slaves theoretically could have left, but this is a much less plausible alternative than would-be illegal immigrants staying put.”

Is this really true? There are *very* powerful economic and political forces pulling immigrants to the United States, legally and illegally. That’s not to suggest illegal immigrants aren’t “choosing” to be here — they clearly are (usually anyway) — but I don’t find the proposition that the extremely poor or politically dissident should “stay put” very plausible.

Let’s say there was no restriction on anyone entering the United States of America. With a doubling of the population the US’s per capita GDP falls to be just below Slovinia. Slovinia is ranked at the 30th highest per capita GDP, which is not bad considering it is still above 160 other countries. As the US population triples, the US per capita GDP falls to be about the same as Barbados ranked 44th highest. When the population quadruples US’s per capita GDP falls to Latvia’s level. Latvia is ranked at 55th highest. The US will reach an equilibrium per capita GDP level when the population quintuples and the US per capita GDP is nearly the world average – just above Botswana’s per capita GDP. But the equilibrium level would hold if all countries had no restrictions on immigration. However, since the US will be the only country with this fools policy, there is no reason why the population increase and the decline in the per capita GDP should stop here.

But hey, this is small price to pay to regain our “morality”. Right?

@Tom Dougherty,

I’m just checking here — did you get those numbers by assuming that the GDP of the US is a fixed quantity in no way affected, directly or indirectly, by the number of workers, number of consumers, etc?

Unassailable logic. Now if you and everyone else wouldn’t mind leaving so I can spend my $14 trillion in peace …

@Pandaemoni

Those born abroad are only subject to the unfairness of the laws mentioned *if* they choose to enter the country and, even then, *only if* they choose to do so in a manner that violate U.S. immigration laws. Non-citizens born abroad remain free to stay outside the country, where the laws have no effect, or to enter legally.

The choice to enter illegally is clearly material here. Being born outside the U.S. happens to be a necessary condition to suffering the sting of those unfair laws because we abide by jus soli in most cases, but being born outside the U.S. is not a sufficient condition for the application of those laws absent that choice.

Couldn’t that be translated into Jim Crow like so?:

“Those born black are only subject to the unfairness of the laws mentioned *if* they choose to act uppity and, even then, *only if* they choose to do so in a manner that violates state Jim Crow laws. Blacks are free to not act all uppity, and if they do so they will not draw the law’s ire.

The choice to act uppity is clearly material here. Being born black happens to be a necessary condition to suffering the sting of those unfair laws because we abide by jus soli in most cases, but being black is not a sufficient condition for the application of those laws absent that choice to act uppity.

Emphasis where I have changed things.

@ziel

Just as a trespasser, who trespasses on private property must suffer the penalties associated with that act (a fine, or even jail time if the trespass is serious enough), so must an illegal immigrant suffer the consequences of his illegal trespass into another country.

Again, here is the Jim Crow translation:
Just as a trespasser, who trespasses on private property must suffer the penalties associated with that act (a fine, or even jail time if the trespass is serious enough), so must an black suffer the consequences of his illegal trespass into the areas of this country the law reserves for whites.

Emphasis where I changed stuff.

Furthermore, those two situations aren’t perfectly analogous,you’re asking a lot more of someone to let a person onto their property then you are asking them to let someone into their country.

But even if they were, even if you could give yourself rights by making extended analogies, just because someone has a right to do something, doesn’t mean they should. I have a right to cheat on my fiancee with another woman, in the sense that there is no law against it where I live. But I’d still be a huge jerk if I did. Even if we did have a right to punish illegal immigrants for trespassing onto our country, that doesn’t mean we’re not bad people for doing so.

To extend the metaphor further, if I caught someone trespassing on my property and they could provide a good enough reason (i.e. they’re taking a shortcut to the hospital,or to an important job interview), I wouldn’t press charges, and I’d verbally rebuke anyone who did.

I hope everyone here understands the U.S. is bizarrely tolerant of immigrants, even illegal ones, in relation to the rest of the world.

The fact that other people are worse doesn’t make us good. This is about doing the right thing, not about having higher status than other countries.

It’s tangled up with the whole the distinction between active assistant and refraining from harm. I know it is your view that governments are actively harming by outlawing migration, but supporters or restrictions view it in terms of the United States, as an entity, not having any obligation to help. You could try to make the argument about the descendants of slaves, but it is much less plausible. ‘We’ gave of the moral option of neglect when we enslaved their ancestors. Again, these arguments do not convince me that immigration restrictions are justified, by they do convince me that there is a substantial moral difference between them and Jim Crow.

I couldn’t stop myself doing a fist-pump when I read the title of this post. But I have a horrible feeling that Bryan isn’t changing anyone’s mind.

Most of the folks who don’t want to open the borders view them as enforcing a legitimate property right held by the government of the United States (as an agent of its people), and I think it seems like Bryan is sidestepping this point.

Many libertarians don’t think that the government legitimately owns, well, anything really (and thinks the conflation of shared ownership by the people with government ownership is an amusing mistake people make because they’re brainwashed or suffering from cognitive biases). So we find Bryan’s arguments convincing, if we even needed to be convinced in the first place.

There’s no reason people shouldn’t believe both that the government legitimately owns the land within the lines on the map, AND that it’s immoral to restrict entry, but this appears to conflict with typical moral intuitions about property rights (that e.g. I have no moral duty to invite the homeless guy on the corner to sleep in my basement).

I would really love to see Bryan address this point more directly, because the cause is doomed to failure if we can only persuade libertarians!

“Give us your poor” does not appear on the Stature of Liberty and it is not a statue of immigration. For those who favor open immigration or immigration without limits, please show me where it has been successful? How well is it working in Britain, France, or Sweden? Swedes can thank immigrants for much of their exploding crime rate. Brits and Frogs better get used to living under Sharia law and learn to defend themselves. More U.S. Americans are killed by illegal immigrants each year than are killed in two wars. There is a greater distinction between Jim Crow laws and immigration policy than there is between our sworn enemies and ILLEGAL immigrants. I have some wonderful neighbors who immigrated to the U.S.A. (no it’s not racist to say U.S.A.) legally and allowing illegals to live, work, and roam freely here is an insult and a mockery to them and all LAW-ABIDING CITIZENS. My daughter was hit by a driver who was obviously here illegally. She couldn’t speak English and she didn’t have a driver’s license. The police officer used an interpreter from a nearby burger joint to speak for the woman and I suspect she too was here illegally too. The officer never questioned the driver’s legal status and he simply wrote her a ticket for the accident. I guess we were lucky because most illegals don’t have insurance and they usually run from the accident scene. Before one of you claim illegals would carry insurance if they weren’t here illegally, I suggest you take a trip to Mexico and most of South America.

You could say that the treatment illegal immigrants receive is an appropriate punishment for their law-breaking. This position would be plausible if legal immigration were easy. But for the typical low-skilled immigrant, legal immigration is virtually impossible.

So the difficulty of accomplishing X legally justifies accomplishing X illegally? Or, at least, mitigates the wrongness of accomplishing X illegally?

My owning a Ferrari is virtually impossible as well. Therefore, my stealing a Ferrari should be viewed differently from other types of theft.

Perhaps immigration restrictions are a monstrous injustice. That doesn’t make them irrational, Caplan.

Since you’ve taken it upon yourself to dust off the specter of Jim Crow laws, let’s go back to that era and recall some other key details.

Specifically, what were the consequences of them? Well, they were one of the catalysts for the Great Migration during the early part of the 20th century, where millions of southern blacks headed north to look for work in the industrialized cities of the northeast and midwest.

Stop for a moment to consider just how well that worked out. Was it all peaches and cream, with black workers adding to the pool of blue collar labor in those cities, and both the workers and the factory owners/managers growing more prosperous? Not really. The causes of decline are varied and complex, but I look around and I see that large portions of those destination cities in the Great Migration–Detroit, Baltimore, Cleveland, D.C., Philadelphia, Chicago, and others–are little more than burned out, deserted ruins today. Does Caplan have any thoughts to offer about how this came to be? Does he care? Or are posts like these more about flattering his own sense of moral superiority to those awful tribalists out there in flyover country? To ask the question is to answer it.

Tom Dougherty,

If you’ve never seen him address the point, you might have missed more than a couple posts — he does address it, by challenging the premise. See for example here

It is not unassailable to claim that increasing the population of the US, even slowly, would decrease US per capita GDP. Yes, I agree that if, overnight, billions of people moved here, there would be a large adjustment problem because you hadn’t changed the capital stock etc. (One might wonder why people would continue to immigrate if you assume that happened, but I think you’ve addressed this. You’ve just implicitly defined “relaxing immigration restrictions” as “more people instantly move here than say they wish to move to any OECD country, much less the US in particular.” No arguing with a definition!) But the most pessimistic theory of the effect of population on per capita GDP is that it’s in the long run neutral, even assuming no complementarities etc.

First time I’ve heard anyone refer to D.C., Philly or Chicago as burned out, deserted ruins as a consequence of the Great Migration.

I said large portions of them; I didn’t make a blanket statement like that. And for the record, I live in Baltimore; and yes, big portions of it are places no sensible person would ever live if he could avoid it. Southeastern DC is of the same piece, as is North Philly and Camden, New Jersey, just across the Delaware River from the heart of Philadelphia.

Blaming the collapse of Detroit as a fundamental consequence of black migration is one of the most hilariously bad arguments I’ve seen in a long time — I only hope I haven’t been trolled by undetected sarcasm.

Then I would suggest you need to brush up on your urban history. Here’s wikipedia on the 1967 race riots in Detroit:

The 1967 Detroit riot, also known as the 12th Street riot, was a civil disturbance in Detroit, Michigan that began in the early morning hours of Sunday, July 23, 1967. The precipitating event was a police raid of an unlicensed, after-hours bar then known as a blind pig, on the corner of 12th (today Rosa Parks Boulevard) and Clairmount streets on the city’s Near West Side. Police confrontations with patrons and observers on the street evolved into one of the deadliest and most destructive riots in United States history, lasting five days and surpassing the violence and property destruction of Detroit’s 1943 race riot, which occurred 24 years earlier.

Coleman Young, Detroit’s first black mayor, wrote in 1994:

“ The heaviest casualty, however, was the city. Detroit’s losses went a hell of a lot deeper than the immediate toll of lives and buildings. The riot put Detroit on the fast track to economic desolation, mugging the city and making off with incalculable value in jobs, earnings taxes, corporate taxes, retail dollars, sales taxes, mortgages, interest, property taxes, development dollars, investment dollars, tourism dollars, and plain damn money. The money was carried out in the pockets of the businesses and the white people who fled as fast as they could. The white exodus from Detroit had been prodigiously steady prior to the riot, totally twenty-two thousand in 1966, but afterwards it was frantic. In 1967, with less than half the year remaining after the summer explosion—the outward population migration reached sixty-seven thousand. In 1968 the figure hit eighty-thousand, followed by forty-six thousand in 1969.[63]

According to economist Thomas Sowell:[64]

Before the ghetto riot of 1967, Detroit’s black population had the highest rate of home-ownership of any black urban population in the country, and their unemployment rate was just 3.4 percent. It was not despair that fueled the riot. It was the riot which marked the beginning of the decline of Detroit to its current state of despair. Detroit’s population today is only half of what it once was, and its most productive people have been the ones who fled.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_Detroit_riot#Aftermath

Who knows more about the history of Detroit, you or Coleman Young, johnleemk? Do you think Thomas Sowell is just making things up?

My point is not that it’s all black people’s fault that Detroit and the South Side of Chicago are wretched, dangerous places to live (although certainly, people like the rioters mentioned above certainly are culpable to some degree); my point is that people of different ethnic or cultural groups do not always get along swimmingly. Far from it. Now, race relations seem to have improved between black and white people in this country over the last 40 years or so, and that’s swell! But as they say in the finance business, past performance is no guarantee of future success.

The process of integration and assimilation is often a mysterious and messy process that occasionally go awry. When it does, there are serious consequences. Whether its riots in Detroit, trains being bombed outside Madrid by Islamic fundamentalists, Anders Bering Brievik coldly slaughtering dozens teenage leftists, Coptic Christians being gunned down in the streets of Cairo…ethnic and cultural divisions are real, and they are big. Bryan is a smart guy. His failure to seriously grapple with these issues is strange. Hence my supposition that posts like these are a kind of self-flattery for him.

Ryan P,

Your link, even though about wages and not per capita GDP, bolsters my point. Bryan writes, “Immigration restrictions “work” – they successfully create price wedges greater than any other”. Open borders will also “work” – successfully eliminating wage differentials between the US and the rest of the world. You will increase the welfare of most people on earth – at least for a little while – at the expense of the welfare of the people in the US.

Wikipedia’s definition of open borders is: An open border is a border that enables free movement of people between different jurisdictions with limited or no restrictions to movement.

The OECD does not have open borders with the rest of the world (no country I know of does have open borders with the world). So, the people of all countries outside of the OECD will not have the opportunity to move there, but they will have the opportunity to move to the US if we have open borders. (The OECD by the way consists of many countries on many different continents and includes the US. Therefore, it is a very unusually choice to use as an example and I am not sure why you picked it).

The economic argument for open borders is to allow a temporary increase in the welfare of billions of people at the expense of a permanent decrease in the welfare of hundreds of millions of people within the US.

Ryan P,

The economic research on immigration has to do with marginal (read small) changes in the population due to increased immigration, which can be a net positive. With open borders, we are no longer talking about marginal changes in the population, but large scale changes. Any change in economic growth due to a massive influx of immigrants will be minor compared to the changes in population with open borders and will do little to prevent a rapid decline in per capita GDP. Finally, the wage gap due to immigration restrictions does imply that a removal of the restrictions would cause first world wages to fall.

Ryan P,

When you refer to the capital stock driving up native wages (and you say I believe this), I take this to mean that within a country the capital stock drives up the wages those who are native within that country and not the immigrants within the country. Actually, I don’t believe this and I don’t see how anyone who did believe this would worry about any influx large or small of immigrants. Further, if I did believe that the capital stock only boosted the natives’ wages and not the immigrants’ wages I wouldn’t hesitate taking your position on this issue.

Also, regarding the interesting survey you linked to, 700 million people would consider immigrating and 145 million would consider immigrating to the US. If policy makers in the US decided to lift all restrictions on immigration, you could throw all of those numbers out the window. It would not be hard to believe both of those numbers increasing greatly, especially the number that would be willing to come to the US. How much those numbers would actually increase is debatable.

Ryan P,

You are saying that a low capital to labor ratio would cause high returns to capital and increased investment. But this is the situation the third world is in now. The third world has low capital to labor ratios, yet capital isn’t flowing from the first world to the third world to reap the gains from high returns. Not only do I assume this won’t happen, it doesn’t happen. This is called the Lucas paradox.

As the capital to labor ratio falls in the US due to open borders, wages would decline and per capita GDP would decline. Net migration would not decrease until were no gains to be made from relocating to the US. The rate of migration would slow down as you approached an equilibrium level. But I don’t see why migration would stop before an equilibrium level of per capita GDP or perhaps an equilibrium of wages between the US and world was reached.

The problem with the trespass analogy is that I am not allowed to let them onto my property as the government deems them undesirables. This not only infringes on their right to travel (one of the oldest most basic common law rights) but also both their and my right to free association.

Bryan Caplan has got to have the most rosy-eyed view of of the world of anyone I have ever heard of. It must have been a priviledged life that led him here!

Sadly when you come to fuller conciousness, the contradictions fall fast and hard. Here’s one: Every illegal who comes to America multiplies their carbon footprint manyfold. Advocating that everyone be allowed to come here is to advocate for environmental disaster on an unprecedented scale.

Here is another point that Bryan Caplan should understand:
There is something called a commons which consists of finite things, such as, to give a few examples:
(a) road infrastructure
(b) buildable space
(c) public institutions such as schools
(d) the power of the vote and polical control over your institutions
(e) welfare budgets
(f) the environment
(g) the ENVIRONMENT
(h) the courts and criminal justice system
(i) lower-skilled jobs

In an overcrowded country such as India, the commons and the environment are destroyed and quality of life is terrible. Social capital is extremely low, no wants to invest in the commons and the nation stagnates.

The mark of almost all underdeveloped countries is that the commons is tragedy and the only things that remain in good shape privately walled off. Many nations dealing with overpopulation now have ruined commons that were once healthy commons.

The reason borders exist is first of all to protect the commons. Considering that the commons is a tragedy in most countries from whence immigrants currently come, and considering that these immigrants to not arrive with a tradition of investing in the commons, it is impossible to see that open immigration can be anything but a commons-tragedy.

Even if most illegal immigrants were models, using up little welfare and investing in the commons (and the opposite is clearly true these days) the consuming of a share of space and voting power is an absolute and permanent loss to all who are here.

Recent immigrants understand this deeply and often do not favor open borders but tighter limits for America! They understand what they have just acquired and how it is being diluted.

Almost every nation has tighter limits than ours. Are they all the Jim Crow South? Or do they understand reality a bit better?

Perhaps a world where the commons is destroyed and all that is good is in private hands is the libertarian ideal. In that case the libertarian ideal is common across the world and it is decidedly unpleasant to live in.

One group are ancestral victims to US Empire protraction and plunder during an expanding era. The other group are victims to US Empire protectionism and preservation in a declining era. This trend if followed leads us towards a collapsing Empire.

Morally there are no differences between Jim Crow and immigration restrictions . Morality ceases to exist at the point of a gun by one party towards another. The initiation of force has no moral grounds.

By this logic, all laws are Jim Crow laws since they apply to people on one side of a border, but not on the other.

For example, if you are a citizen of another country, do not visit the US, and do not do business inside the borders of the US (which are entirely arbitrary), you don’t have to adhere to US tax law. How is that fair?

Why should people get away with paying no tax, just because of a line on a politician’s map? And how come they don’t have to abide by FDA rulings? etc. (arguments that you don’t agree with those particular bodies or their laws don’t invalidate my point, just by the way)