My Open Borders neglects two major worries about immigration.
The first is contagious disease; I did not see that one coming, though I try to remedy my oversight here.
The second omission is less excusable. Somehow I failed to address immigration’s environmental effects. Here’s what I should have said – and what I will say if there’s ever a second edition.
1. The obvious environmental objection to immigration is that it raises population and therefore leads to more pollution and other negative environmental effects.
2. The naive reply is that immigration merely redistributes environmental harm from one country to another rather than actually increasing environmental harm overall.
3. The wise reply to this naive reply is that precisely because immigration drastically increases wealth creation, it also ipso facto increases the negative environmental byproducts of wealth creation. Immigration’s “trillion-dollar bills on the sidewalk” sit inside a gargantuan wallet of harm to Mother Earth.
4. Note: If you buy this argument, you should be similarly afraid of economic development in the Third World. So rather than opposing immigration, you should oppose economic progress in general.
5. The heart of my reply to the environmental objection: the Environmental Kuznets Curve. Quick summary of the empirics: Moving from low to middle income increases environmental harm, but moving from middle to high income reduces environmental harm. So environmentally speaking, the best thing for the environment is to move from low to high income as quickly as possible. And liberalizing immigration does precisely that! Indeed, immigration lets people leapfrog straight from low to high income without even passing through middle income along the way.
6. Caveat: Standard measures probably overstate environmental quality in low-income countries by ignoring noxious low-tech pollutants like animal and human waste. So leapfrogging straight to high income is even better than it looks.
7. The Environmental Kuznets Curve works through multiple channels: consumer demand (richer people want greener stuff), norms (richer people care more about the planet), and regulation (richer countries can better afford the economic burden) being the most obvious. But we can safely liberalize immigration without pinning down the precise mechanism.
P.S. Any related topics you think I should address?
READER COMMENTS
Gabriel Weil
Jan 13 2021 at 10:34am
I think you need to address climate change in particular. Richer countries still produce more GHG emissions per capita (though less per unit of GDP) than poorer countries. You can still tell a story where more immigration is a net plus for the climate, but it’s tougher than for other environmental issues. More convincingly (at least to me), you can argue that more immigration still produces large net welfare gains, if it would likely exacerbate climate change, and that restricting immigration is an extremely ham-handed and costly way to try to mitigate climate change. I’m not sure you can call carbon pricing a keyhole solution (and it would be odd and unwieldy to just price emissions for immigrants), but it’s a lot better targeted than blocking immigration.
ABV
Jan 13 2021 at 11:34am
The environmental problems like overgrazing in the Sahel or cutting down trees to make charcoal to burn for indoor, open fires have orders of magnitude greater importance in terms of human well being.
Climate change is something that is a long term problem. Overgrazing the Sahel is destroying vast tracts of ecosystems today. Indoor air pollution from dirty cooking fuels is killing millions of people and harming billions today.
Taking a billion people out of those terrible environmental situations and vastly improving their lives and the local environments is a huge win, even if the cost is slightly more CO2 in the near term.
It is an easy trade off if you value human life.
ABV
Jan 13 2021 at 11:39am
Adding to make more clear I agree with your point of huge welfare gains.
Jose Pablo
Jan 13 2021 at 12:45pm
The whole point is that this possible CO2 emissions increasing you are referring to, is related with the GDP per capita increase not with an increase in immigration.
Opposing Third World development to avoid increasing CO2 emissions is a logically coherent position (although it is, very likely, morally terrible).
Opposing immigration to avoid increasing CO2 emissions just make no logical sense. For a given increase in GDP per individual, the emissions would be far less if this increase take place after the individual emigrate to a developed country that if it takes place while he/she remains in its country of origin.
[It is true, however, that directing immigration to European countries would be much more environmentally efficient that allowing them into USA]
Gabriel Weil
Jan 13 2021 at 12:56pm
I don’t disagree with your and Bryan’s point that the same logic that uses climate change as a justification for immigration restriction would also justify opposing third world development. My point is just that the Environmental Kuznets curve does not apply in the same way to climate change as it does to other environmental problems, so a different answer is needed. I think I made it pretty clear that I don’t think this actually justifies immigration restrictions, but I know a lot of climate-focused folks who do and I think it’s an important issue to address head-on.
Jose Pablo
Jan 13 2021 at 1:05pm
You were referring to GHG which for a similar increase in GDP per capita for the immigrant to be, would be less if the individual actually emigrates than if he remains in its country of origin.
Not clear to me what other “environmental issues” you are referring to.
Kalim
Jan 13 2021 at 10:46am
What about the impact of remote work ?
on :
Population distribution
Migration flows (US/EU outflows ? Cities to South, Rural areas ?)
Political impact
nobody.really
Jan 14 2021 at 3:46pm
Speaking of politics….
I have not yet read Caplan’s immigration book–nor Robert Putnam’s latest, The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again.
Putnam had previously documented that ethnic diversity correlated with low social cohesion. If you live in a diverse neighborhood, you don’t trust people who don’t look like you–and you stop trusting people who DO look like you.
And Putman previously wrote Bowling Alone, documenting that American had lost the social cohesion it had achieved in the postwar years, and the difficulties that have resulted.
His latest book tracks the insight from Bowling Alone throughout the 20th century. Apparently the US had low social cohesion around 1900 in the Gilded Age–with lots of labor unrest, assassinations, high income disparity, and anarchy. Since then the nation developed growing social cohesion in fighting through WWI. Cohesion dropped in the Roaring Twenties, but resumed its climb during the Great Depression and WWII. But it plateaued in the 1960s, and began declining thereafter.
So–what happened in the 1960s? Well, lots of things. But one of them was that the US relaxed immigration restrictions, and immigration surged.
Today, the share of the US population that was born elsewhere has never been higher–and our income disparity has never been greater while our social cohesion is never been lower. Coincidence?
Perhaps so. But I’d like to get Caplan’s take on the issue.
Floccina
Jan 13 2021 at 11:25am
They have a case if they look at only co2 but if you add other things:
Almost all plastic in the ocean comes from just 10 rivers
Dylan
Jan 13 2021 at 6:22pm
Two points on that:
My understanding is that study only looked at plastics that enter the ocean via rivers, which is only a fraction of the total plastic in the ocean
Because of the U.S. shipping much of its plastic waste to other countries that do not do a good job of managing the waste, U.S. consumers are still the source of much of the plastic waste that enters the oceans.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/10/201030142125.htm
znonymous
Jan 14 2021 at 1:43pm
Interesting. So, it may be better to throw the plastic in the trash where it will be safely landfilled, instead of “recycling” it and having it be sent to Vietnam and thrown in a river?
Seth
Jan 13 2021 at 12:23pm
What’s the expected urban/suburban/rural split among new immigrants?
I would think that in general, they’ll prefer to live in cities, if they’re allowed to and if there’s enough housing to let it happen.
Keyhole solution: pick an essentially deserted part of the American Southwest, call it ‘immigrant city’, incentivize newcomers to move there, and put https://culdesac.com/ in charge of building a sustainable, pedestrian-centric city there from scratch. I don’t know if this would actually work — I don’t know how easy it is to get a city’s worth of water to a random spot in the desert — but something along these lines would probably lead to a net reduction in emissions pretty quickly on a per capita basis.
Jose Pablo
Jan 13 2021 at 12:56pm
Actually, sending Americans to Europe will be extremely more efficient from an environmental point of view (basically you will cut “Americans” CO2 emissions by half … saving the equivalent to the total CO2 emitted by the 1.4 billion people living in India).
You can also develop “immigrant cities” in Europe (not many deserts but places can be found) to accommodate the Americans.
Actually immingration (in this case from USA to Europe) could be the solution to our CO2 emissions problem!!
Kailer
Jan 13 2021 at 1:38pm
I don’t think this would work. People want to live close to their employers, and employers like to work near their customers. I think that geography is an underrated explanatory factor when it comes to why some countries are poor. Gravity model wants to pull economic activity together, but borders get in the way.
Mark
Jan 13 2021 at 1:35pm
4. If you ever read comments on the New York Times, you would realize that lots of liberals do oppose third-world development for environmental reasons. It’s one of the morally worst political viewpoints in my opinion, but it is fairly widespread.
A big argument here is also that immigration reduces world population because people in first-world countries have much lower fertility than people in third-world countries and immigrants to first-world countries quickly reduce their fertility to match their new home countries (and in some cases, even end up with lower fertility than the native populations). To the extent that World GDP must be limited for environmental reasons, it would be better to do so by reducing fertility and total population rather than per capita GDP so that people can still have high living standards, and immigration is one of the best ways to do this.
Brian
Jan 13 2021 at 8:17pm
The Environmental Kuznets Curve is a new concept to me. My first impression is that there might be something wrong with it.
At high levels of GDP your spending might be 70% services and 30% tangibles but perhaps that does not imply less absolute pollution. One reason is because the 30% figure is relative. If I am wealthy and I spend 500K USD per year the 30% is a big number so there might be an absolutely large amount of pollution. If my local environment seems clean it is because some of that pollution happened in a distant country and I imported their tangible products.
Another problem is that the services versus tangible distinction has an artificial flavor. Everything is services. A lump of coal is services. The person that borrowed the money to buy the mineral rights to the land over the coal seam performed labor to produce the down payment. His labor was a service. The loan is a financial service. The mining company that installed the equipment provided a service. The equipment makers amortized the design cost for the equipment and applied labor to make the equipment. The designers performed labor. The equipment was made from steel. The difference between the cost of steel and the cost of ore is labor performed at the smelter. The equipment in the smelter is the product of design and assembly labor. When everything is labor the categories “industrial economy” and “post-industrial service economy” do not make sense.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average contains Microsoft and McDonalds and JP Morgan. It contains no steel makers. People might say the name of the DJIA is reflection of its origin story. I say its still a good name because all industry is labor is service.
High income people buy more flights. The price of the ticket pays for a huge amount of fuel if the flight is trans-Pacific and that fuel you will burn in merely 14 hours.
nobody.really
Jan 14 2021 at 3:23pm
Thoughtful, thanks.
Erik
Jan 15 2021 at 3:00am
I guess one might construct a related if somewhat convoluted concern about animal welfare. Rich people eat much more meat and if you believe factory farming is wrong, well, creating more rich people is probably going to increase it.
Comments are closed.