Squalor and immigration

If you want to reduce people flocking to the US’s good institutions, bring the institutions to the people. Paul Romer’s charter cities are a wonderful idea. Imagine if in exchange for recognition the US (or any other country with decent institutions) was able to set up a charter city in Somaliland. I think that coast was a hub for commerce in the past, whats to stop it being one again? I can only dream.

I think crime rates and unemployment rates would be more useful for the reason you mention, that low income immigrants aren’t a bad thing. The biggest costs often associated with immigration, as I understand it, are purported effects on crime, and expenses incurred to taxpayers (for which unemployment may be a good stand in).

If people from a given country of origin have a low average income, but also a low unemployment rate and low rate of criminality, there’s no more reason to discourage their immigration than to discourage that of high income immigrants.

If we forget about public service and entitlement expenses and differential crime rates, the economic case for restricting poor immigration is no stronger than the case for tariffs on poor countries.

Jon Murphy,

I have a slight concern with crime statistics: most crime is committed against members of one’s own community, which means that if the rate at which crime is reported among immigrants (and there are obvious reasons to suspect crime in immigrant communities is disproportionately underreported) then statistics from reported crime would underestimate crime rates in such communities. This effect may be negligible or nonexistent, of course; maybe someone has done a study that has controlled for it that I’m not aware of. One could also argue that the intra-community nature of most crime also makes the point moot since ‘natives’ would go unaffected by it.

And on welfare (rather, public cost in general), again, maybe research has been done that answers this question, but if/inasmuch as an immigrant population is disproportionately poor, they will likely, once naturalized, disproportionately qualify for medicaid, send their kids to public schools, etc. In general, I would expect poorer people to impose a higher net cost on the state. I don’t purport to have done the math, of course. Just speculating.

E Harding I do think country of origin should be considered when it comes to immigration policy for reasons of cultural compatibility.

The problem with this is that it is so highly subjective. Are Hispanics culturally incompatible, and if so based on what criterion? Their Catholic religion? Their Spanish heritage?

What counts as “American” culture with which immigrants must be compatible? Do Chinese Americans count? Which American ethnic groups are to be included in the definition of American culture?

If you’re referring to some sort of ideological belief system, we already bar people who profess belief in communism or have membership in terrorist groups or “violent extremism”.

Further, if we’re going to use nationality as a stand-in for potential cultural incompatibility, that would be unfair to many potential immigrants who don’t happen to share the views of the majority of their countrymen. Indeed, a disproportionate share of our immigrants have always come from ethnic, religious, and cultural minorities in their home countries, precisely because those groups are most likely to be fleeing persecution.

Great post Scott! I really like your posts where you bring in a new set of data and explain what it means to a previously nebulous and subsurface question. I aspire to make my writing more like yours. Thanks for taking the time to share this with the world

Trump’s mistake is a bit like Southey’s mistake. To stand on a hill, etc.

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I analysed the overall relationship between skill-selectivity and average income:

https://medium.com/@NoahCarl/immigrant-groups-that-are-more-skill-selected-have-higher-average-incomes-b97f09b2bbe2

But education is only a proxy for something else, isn’t it?

Psych tests would be more direct. What we want are ambitious psychopaths. Zola’s “egoists, ambitious folk, beasts keen and patient after the spoils.”

The kind of people who make contacts instead of friends. People who are always on, and never stop performing. They present themselves one way to one audience and adopt a different persona when that would advantage them.

For the kind of manipulative psychopaths who are really successful and productive, credentials are only an outward show. What’s inside is the drive to dominate. Low on warmth. High on self-assurance. People who network, and make strategic alliances, and jockey for position, and crave applause.

A government that could identify these psychopaths in advance would have found the only tax base they would ever need.

Australia manages the range of countries you mention Scott, but not perhaps quite the range of migrants, since we tend to use education as a selection device.

Leaving aside arguments about labour market and democratic bargaining effects, the only recurringly problematic migrant group seems to be mainstream Muslims. (Not Ibadis, Alevis, Ahmmadis or Ismailis, but they are not mainstream Muslims.) Mainstream Muslims tend to have crime rates at or above those of the local residents and have serious integration problems above a certain critical mass, all connected to patterns with Islam.

Leaving aside the issue of particular groups, I am sceptical of open border policies, because I do not believe the social and other infrastructure of creating and maintaining successful societies is infinitely flexible.

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@Andrew_FL:

The income numbers would likely fall simply by math, but the question is “by how much?”. I doubt it’d be by that much simply because of American institutions. We can probably take the Somali figure in Prof. Sumner’s link as the absolute lower bound since they are refugees. To that end, we’re still looking at very productive members of society. For the sake of argument, let’s say there are 3 million people coming in each year and they all initially earn the 22k the refugees earn. That means an increase of $66,000,000,000 per year in the US economy just because of immigration. And this is likely the lower bound.

The US provides opportunities for all. Why not let them in and enrich us all?

@Jon Murphy-I find that reasoning excessively reductive and not particularly convincing. But the question of “why” or “why not” in this case hinges on whether the polity is allowed to value things other than maximizing GDP as the highest good. Clearly in your opinion they are not.

This is somewhat tangential, but I think conservatives (such as Trump) have dropped a huge argumentative asset in this hostile approach to immigration from poor countries.

They should, instead, be celebrating and advertising the success of such immigrants, especially those from Africa and the Carribean, as evidence that racism isn’t what’s holding back ethnic minorities, and that America being a land of opportunity is a truth, not a microagression.

Pew put out a bunch of stats a couple years ago (income, education, poverty, etc.) on black immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean, and elsewhere, compared both to American-born black people and other immigrant groups. Overall, the picture is a pretty optimistic one for even comparatively uneducated demographic groups (Central American black immigrants, for example are on average less educated than American born black people, but have significantly higher income; and also a higher income than Hispanic immigrants).

http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/04/09/chapter-1-statistical-portrait-of-the-u-s-black-immigrant-population/

This seems like a good success story painting an image of America as a meritocratic, ‘rags to riches’ society that conservatives claim it to be, rather than a systemically oppressive one, and would be a potent rebuttal to progressives’ narrative on race. It’s be quite a thing to have in their arsenal if they weren’t afraid to pick it up.

@Scott Sumner:

“In other words, you can’t have it both ways. Is it about race? Culture? Skill level? The restrictionsts need to think more clearly about what they are actually objecting to. If it’s about attitudes towards education, how do we describe the culture of Nigerian immigrants with advanced degrees?”

I can’t speak for others, but I’ve consistently advocated for a Canadian-style race-blind skill-preference system for more than a decade. Empirically, this has allowed Canada and Australia to avoid the populist backlash that has afflicted so many other Western countries, even though both Canada and Australia admit non-whites by the truckload. As a non-white American citizen myself, I have some personal interest in not seeing white racism get out of control, and I am convinced that the Canadian approach is more effective than all realistic alternatives at achieving that.

It should be no surprise that I have no problem with the current crop of Nigerian immigrants with advanced degrees. (I’m not sure how many will want to continue staying here, given that they can’t create a new group identity the way Indian-Americans have; they are too small in number relative to non-immigrant African-Americans to substantially change what typical Americans think of Africans. But that can be their decision to make, we don’t need to make it for them.) My objections regarding African immigration are restricted to (i) misleading implications concerning how many more we can admit in the near future without significantly reducing selectivity, and (ii) suppression of information about how much worse the outcomes are without selectivity (see e.g. Somalis in Minnesota). It’s a success story, and one that is useful for shattering some preconceptions, but it’s not one that can be scaled up much for now.

(Indian immigration, on the other hand, has some near-term scaling possibilities…)

@Noah Carl:

Many foreigners already attend US universities and then return to their home countries, sometimes after also working for cutting-edge American companies. US immigration policy explicitly and intentionally encourages this pattern (look up e.g. “Optional Practical Training”), and it has contributed a lot to Asian development. Not saying that it’s a cakewalk in situations where many immigrants have good reason to have little loyalty to their home country, but we have blueprints for avoiding destructive brain drain.

@Mark:

“This is somewhat tangential, but I think conservatives (such as Trump) have dropped a huge argumentative asset in this hostile approach to immigration from poor countries.

They should, instead, be celebrating and advertising the success of such immigrants, especially those from Africa and the Carribean, as evidence that racism isn’t what’s holding back ethnic minorities, and that America being a land of opportunity is a truth, not a microagression.”

Sorry, but no. India (i) still has a much lower per capita GDP than Mexico and (ii) has NOT been criticized as an immigration source country by Trump. Trump is not hostile to “immigration from poor countries”. He’s doing the most important part of his job. It would be great if he was also as articulate as Milton Friedman, and it would be great if I had a pony, too, but we can live without either of those. His actual policy is trivially defensible; there are ‘conservatives’ currently dropping the ball, but they are not in the White House.

(See also “Model Minority Myth”, if you thought there was any money being left on the table here.)

*correction: my second sentence was supposed to be: “It is, however, significantly higher than average income of Hispanic immigrants (38,000).”

The ‘not’ is not supposed to be there.

My argument has nothing to do with GDP at all. I made no reference to it. So, I don’t understand where this accusation comes from.

An extremely curious statement. What did you mean by this, then?

That means an increase of $66,000,000,000 per year in the US economy just because of immigration.

Where is this 66 billion dollars of money show up, if not in GDP?

Rather, all I said was allowing people to come to this country will provide value; in other words, allowing immigration will give people, both Americans and immigrants, the option of improving their lives.

Your example of value was pecuniary. What value being added is being compensated by this income, if not production?

I want people to value things other than GDP. That is precisely why I support open borders and immigration in general and why I oppose immigration restrictions.

You want people to value you other things which is precisely why you deny anything else than pecuniary value added be admissable as a consideration in setting immigration policy, indeed you deny that people in a democracy ought be allowed to set an immigration policy. Makes perfect sense.

Mark,

“The same ‘systemic racism’ that purportedly explains the under-performance of African Americans should afflict black immigrants. To the extent that they don’t controlling for differences in things like education (hence looking at specifically Caribbeans and Central American black immigrants, who have comparable education levels), this suggests factors other than race eo ipso explain underperformance relative to other demographic groups. If you have other compositional differences between American-born black people and black immigrants, do elucidate. Calling something a myth doesn’t constitute a refutation.”

My point was that your basic mental model, that all that’s missing is the right argument, is wrong. The US mainstream media and political establishment are not interested in the truth here. Comparison of Asian Americans and similar groups to their home-country counterparts, after applying whatever combination of controls is appropriate, already provides enough information to anyone who’s actually interested in information here. I’d be thrilled to see you prove me wrong on a nontrivial scale here, but I’m not going to hold my breath.

Fortunately, Trump has demonstrated that simply ignoring the preferences of the media and political establishment is a viable strategy. We don’t need to waste any more time trying to persuade people who are actually arguing in bad faith; it’s time to just get things done.

Mark,

We agree that America really still is a land of opportunity, and at this point “structural racism” is only a second-order problem. This is obvious if you look at Asian or black immigrants who came in the race-blind front door.

Now it’s time to close the back door, and double the throughput of the front door as soon as it’s politically feasible.

@Andrew_Fl

My personal opinions on the matter are not of relevance here. Rather, I was addressing your comment “These numbers [annual income] suggest that our current immigration system selects for high skilled immigrants. They would undoubtedly be much lower under an open borders immigration policy.”

I pointed out that yes, the numbers would likely fall because of math but immigrants still offer many opportunities to make themselves and us wealthier, as evidenced by the numbers Dr. Sumner provides.

The time I did express my opinion was when I said GDP is not the only measure that matters, that I want people to have other considerations. The fact I want people to have choices are why I support open borders. This was in response to your claim that I think GDP is the only thing that matters (a claim in and of itself that was strange considering I never said GDP or expressed my opinion up until that point).

Further, your claim here, that open borders somehow means “people have a fundamental, natural right to be Americans and that therefore Americans have no political right to tell them they cannot be,’ suggests a deep misunderstanding on open borders, what they mean, the difference between citizenship and immigration, and the right to contract, none of which I have time to go over right now and would greatly detract further from the original post and my original response to you.

@Hans

Is the phrase negative because the sentence
referred to recipients as handouts?

No. It’s negative because you seem to think being replaced by foreign labor is a bad result.

That is true in theory but not always in
reality…

You don’t really provide any evidence that my theory is incorrect. You provide a paradox (something that is true in theory but not in reality is therefore neither a theory nor reality. A theory that does not reflect reality is no theory at all). You say “These professionals
will have difficulty in finding the same jobs
and if so, at a reduced salary,” but that is irrelevent. Of course they won’t find the same jobs since they were replaced. Rather, it’s that it frees the resources (these professionals) for other uses.

Mr Murphy, when domestic labor is replaced
with a foreigner simply to reduce cost it is a
major issue. Ask those whom are now unemployed
or underemployed. (U6)

If foreign workers are added to the labor market
because there is a shortage of workers it benefits all parties.

“Of course they won’t find the same jobs since they were replaced. Rather, it’s that it frees the resources (these professionals) for other uses.”

This process offers no net gains for the domestic
economy, unless those being re-deployed provide
an increase in productivity and subsequently a
positive addition to net wealth.

The effects are even more harmful for those with
a lack of skill sets.

I am of the opinion, that foreign labor replacing
domestic workers offer only a net gain if there is labor shortage or the cashiered labor
is reemployed in a more productive task.

Furthermore, US domestic productivity annual increases have been declining in the
past two decades, adding to the burden of those whom have been fired or underemployed.

http://portalseven.com/employment/unemployment_rate_u6.jsp

This is what the tech sector is doing
to the American labor force.

Why do they not also import human labor
to replace the very expensive management
in conjunction with replacing its work force.

IApples has billions in cash assets but not a
single working plant in America. Perhaps
they and others are in pursuit of gross margins
similar to that of your local Internet providers.

Would it be fair to say, that 95% or more of
tech products are produced overseas?

If these labor components were lacking domestically, everyone would be
sympathetic to their needs, however, it appears to be only a
cost cutting measure and an ever larger corporate
profit.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/01/29/tech-firms-immigration-bill-threatens-college-grad-salaries/