Is Immigration a Basic Human Right? My Opening Statement

The weakest part of this kind of argument is the cost to native residents. It’s a banal observation that the vast majority countries (perhaps all?), restrict immigration. They do this because there’s a significant political constituency for immigration restrictions. So I don’t think your beef is with governments per we as your fellow citizens.

So why are so many citizens opposed to immigration and how could they be persuaded otherwise? I don’t think calling them racist or nativist would do the trick. I think it’s related to a cost benefit analysis that economic studies you point to completely omit.

Here’s one modest proposal to test my hypothesis: offer all the immigration restrictions money to change their mind l. If they are not willing to change their position, then we’ll know it’s not about money and thus all economic studies about how much richer we’ll become aren’t responding to their concerns. If they are then you have a feasible public policy for increasing immigration.

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Bryan, I don’t actually detect an argument here that there is a right to immigration, i.e., that all human beings have an equal right to live wherever they want in the world. You simply seem to assume it. But this is precisely the matter under dispute. It seems to me you have a burden to support this view, if for no other reason than that many disagree with you.

Nick,

Many of the “club goods” provided by governments are excludable (i.e., a government can respect the human right to immigrate and still restrict many benefits to citizens without offering them to immigrants)

EB:

You assert that history warns us of immigration’s potentially “awful” consequences. Can you share with us the historical examples that you have in mind?

If you will accept that there are concomitant obligations of some (sometimes all) required for the existence of rights of some (or all);

Right to freedom of worship requires that others are obligated not to interfere in that worship;

The same with freedom of speech; then:

Obligations (and their performance) are what “support” or “create” Rights.

So, what would be the obligations of occupants of lands and cities to others that would make “immigration” (joining in occupation) a “Right?”

Are people obligated to allow others to join in occupation? If so, whence does that obligation arise?

@Nick Rowe,

Bryan has already answered your analogy by pointing out that the idea that people consent to government is a fiction. The club you speak of is one in which our membership is involuntary. We never agreed that the club should restrict who we may associate with. We never voluntarily joined the club, and our membership dues are extracted by force.

@Don Boudreaux
Immigration from Europe into “The New World,” beginning in the 17th Century, did not go well for the indigenous people.

@nick Rowe,
Are there any limits on the conditions this mutual aid society may impose on it’s willingness to defend my house? What if I don’t like those conditions? If my eight neighbors on either sides of me form a mutual defense club without my participation, and decide that everyone within it’s perimeter must donate their home to common-pool community ownership and rent it to whomever the club membership thinks should get a free house, why should I have to sell my home and move to escape from their demands? Does the mutual defense club trump all of my basic rights to private property and freedom of association?

If an individual treated other people the same way the government does, would he clearly be a horrible criminal?

This is the Rothbardian “proof” that taxation is theft. So given that the government is a gang of thieves extorting the native population with taxes, isn’t not letting outsiders into the country to be subject to these vicious depredations actually the moral thing to do?

I can’t take the $75 trillion figure seriously. Do a simple thought experiment.

Move everyone from Africa, South Asia, the Middle East, and South America to the United States. That’s billions of people from countries with bad social norms and institutions. Is it reasonable to think that the institutional thread in the United States could bare the imported norms and beliefs of billions of people? No, it would be swamped and I think there is little doubt that the country would take on the economic character of these other regions, in which case GDP would not only plummet for the natives but for everyone.

@EB (and Maniel):

Are those historical examples the exceptions or the rules? I mean, we can assert, reasonably, that immigration is a net good even if there are some extreme outliers that say otherwise (I’d also assert some of those outliers are not applicable here. For example, the European immigration to the New World was problematic not so much because they sought to overthrow the natives, but because they brought germs with them that decimated the population. That is significantly less of an issue today).

The short version of my question: what probability do you attach that immigration is, on net, harmful?

Are Human rights expansive?

Can something that wasn’t a human right, become a human right?

What makes something a human right? declaring it so, and then getting a government to recognize it?

maybe you’re ahead of the curve here, and a few years your definition of human rights, will be accepted

maybe human rights have always been a construct, and the more we try to shove under that umbrella, the more that makes the construct apparent and degrades all of them

By the way, Bryan’s “Exile” argument cuts both ways, when you remember that countries are groups of people as much as areas of land, and think in terms of the Coase Theorem. Immigration means that the natives are exiled, without their consent, to live in some foreign country, chosen by other people, even without moving a kilometre. Sure, it’s a matter of degree, and depends on how many immigrants, and how quickly they come, and on how much the immigrants adjust to the natives or vice versa.

Consider the simplest case, with two identical islands, with one person originally on each island. An allocation where each agent has the right to move to either island is identical to the allocation where each agent has the right to exile the other agent to either island.

@Nick Rowe,

Immigration means that the natives are exiled, without their consent, to live in some foreign country, chosen by other people, even without moving a kilometre.

Are people entitled to stop their neighbors from selling houses to foreigners? And if so why only foreigners and not racial minorities or different demographic age groups?

Is my life more affected by immigrants moving in next door than by an elderly retirement home, or by gentrification, or a half-way house?
Isn’t this just basically NIMBYism?

There’s lots of ways neighborhoods can evolve, not just due to immigration. Does the mere fact of neighborhood socioeconomic evolution cause people to be “exiled”. And if so aren’t we all exiles in a foreign land by the time we hit 80?

Hazel: yep. It’s (as always) a matter of degree, because there are always trade-offs. The optimal size of countries (like optimal currency areas) is presumably somewhere between the extremes of every family being its own country and One World Government with everyone having Global Citizenship papers issued by the UN and the right to move anywhere.

@Jon Murphy

It was an assertion, but what is the counter-argument?

Are you arguing that transporting 2 billion people from the Middle East, Africa, and South America would not produce profound and negative consequences for the institutional and political structures in the U.S.? This is not even including the civil unrest that would ensue. At the very least, you must admit that there would be major changes..

To your second point…

The reason we should not curtail the rights of existing citizens to avoid a breakdown in the structure is because that, in and of itself, would constitute a breakdown in our institutions. I think we can agree on that. But where we differ is that you think that logic should extend to immigration. I do not. The reason is that, on average, the rate of breakdown will be much faster via immigration of highly discordant beliefs versus a breakdown from internal changes in beliefs by existing citizens. This gap has closed to some degree because of technology but it is still wide in my view.

Spatial game theory gets at the heart of the issue very succinctly. In a world where there are cooperators and defectors, cooperators cannot survive long without forming pockets or subgroups that keep out the defectors. But then this creates a philosophical paradox…in order to maintain pockets or subgroups of cooperators, those subgroups must not permit or always cooperate with the outside.

We have the right to move freely between states, cities and counties, etc.

If this works, how can one argue for restrictions between countries? Is it reasonable to conclude then that arguments to infringe my free movement can only be based on cultural identity.

@Larry

It’s just the non-aggression principle. You relocated from Alaska to Ohio. If politicians had drawn international boundaries differently, so that those were in two different countries, would that have the effect that your relocation would harm Ohio in some way in which it doesn’t under the present circumstances?

Just curious, has this line of argument ever persuaded anyone who wasn’t already convinced?

@Kurt

I think there are two types of arguments that get used that both sides conflate. One is a more pragmatic argument that is open to empirical evidence along the lines of argument in your second paragraph. I think that line of thinking is probably correct, but it’s a different type than the purely moral/idealistic argument that isn’t really open to evidence (or at least not the same type of evidence)

I say there are some things that are so bad, that we shouldn’t do them even if not doing so meant the destruction of civilization. Let’s say we lived in a world that was much like this one, except we were required to ritualistically sacrifice a couple hundred innocent teenagers every year or else the world would be destroyed by monsters. On a purely utilitarian basis, the sacrifice makes sense. You’re saving literally billions of lives (plus the lives of all of their children and children’s children) vs. a couple hundred. Nevertheless, I think the moral choice is clear in that we’d have to accept destruction rather than sacrificing innocent lives.

I put open immigration into this type of basket, meaning even if I was sure that it would utterly destroy our way of life, I’d still have to support it. Luckily I think it will do nothing of the sort, and that it would actually over time raise billions of people out of absolute poverty, and make the world a better place for most people.

@Kurt Schuler

An abstract argument asserting that, say, 10 million Somalis immigrating to Switzerland is no different from 10 million Canadians immigrating to the United States, is absurd on its face.

That’s a good point to bring up because so many Americans keep citing Islam as a basis for their cultural assimilation objection to immigration.

But America doesn’t get very much Islamic immigration. Arab-Muslims are a tiny percentage of our immigrant population, smaller even than Asians and Indians. We get immigrants from Hispanic countries, which are Roman Catholic and Spanish speaking. They have a cultural heritage that is not too different from ours. So the cultural assimilation argument doesn’t hold water. Hispanics aren’t going to change America any more than Irish and Italians did. And our tiny percentage of Muslim immigrants isn’t going to change anything either.

IF we had a large number of Muslim immigrants as in Europe, I would be more receptive to arguments that we’re inviting trouble, but we don’t. We don’t have the same problems as Europe.

I’m for open borders, but I wouldn’t use the concept of human rights as lightly

1. Human rights originally were expressly protective rights of the individual against the state. As such, they clearly always have an aspirational quality, as the state is de facto able to violate them. This is a huge danger — I think it’s worth keeping the concept of protection against the state as sharp as possible.

2. Immigration as a human right would be a protection of non-citizens and not-(yet)-residents against a state. I wouldn’t conflate this with the right not to be murdered by my sovereign. Of course, I still want states to behave in a defensible way towards everybody, not commit crimes against humanity — I just see human rights as a last line of defense if that last claim is not fulfilled.

3. A state can respect human rights and still be terribly coercive in many things, including the economy. I don’t like it — and it’s mostly inefficient — but it’s much less bad than real despotism.

4. In particular, living in a collective will likely mean accepting collectivel held beliefs. I’m afraid we do live in collectives. Our individual freedom is aspirational, and is created by artifacts like the concept of human rights.

5. One collectively held strong belief seems to be nationalism. I don’t like it, but I feel grossly outnumbered here.

6. The state may be illegitimately coercive in many ways, but enforcing nationalism isn’t one of them; it’s probably not against the will of the majority of the citizens

7. I don’t believe immigration can be enforced against the will of a nation; it will stop being a problem if that will changes. But this will not happen by legalistic arguments

@ John Donnelly,

That’s a fair point, and I didn’t mean to suggest the discussion wasn’t useful, only that Bryan’s case is founded on a premise that he doesn’t really argue. I think my comment was less clear and more snarky than I intended, so let me try again.

Bryan starts from simple premise that it is not legitimate for a government to do anything that would not be allowed for an individual. This premise does all the heavy lifting; everything else follows. But this isn’t an argument for immigration; it is an argument for anarchy (not in the sense of chaos, but just in the sense of no government). Do we allow individuals to lock up people who violate the rights of other individuals? Do we allow them to demand payment to fund such protection arrangements? Some people agree with this position. Others counter that there is a legitimate role for government, making analogies to clubs or shared ownership of houses. I see people articulating their positions well, but I don’t see much persuasion (though I’m open to the possibility I’m just missing it).

I think there is a more interesting discussion to be had among those who accept in principle a legitimate role for the state to control territory and do this with some degree of preference for its citizens, then get into the details. How does immigration impact citizens, both benefits and costs? How should the benefits to immigrants and some citizens be weighed against the costs to other citizens? How can immigration be managed to improve the outcome (e.g. preferences for skilled migrants or selling immigration authorization)? Can other policy changes be wrapped in to build a better overall package (e.g. restricting birthright citizenship)?

Open borders would go a long way to demonstrating – irrefutably – the utter untenability of government as it is practiced in these United (and many other) states. That moves many to fear and oppose it, even people who aren’t normally apologists for the government.