In Open Borders, I never claim that immigration restrictions make life in the First World bad. I don’t try to scare people into supporting more immigration, a la, “Without more immigrants, we’re doomed.” What I claim, rather, is that immigration is a massive missed opportunity. While life is fine the way it is (or was, until a month ago), there is no reason to settle for “fine.” If there is a dependable way to dramatically improve our lives, we should seize it.
What then are we missing? The standard and correct answer is: tens of trillions of dollars every year; see Clemens’ classic “trillion-dollar bills on the sidewalk” article. Allowing human talent to move from low-productivity countries to high-productivity countries greatly enriches mankind. A mind really is a terrible thing to waste. Until recently, though, these tens of trillions of dollars of unrealized gains have been awfully hard to visualize.
Now, human tragedy provides crystal clarity. If you examine almost any American population center today, it doesn’t look bad – just empty. Enormous economic sectors – restaurants, entertainment, retail, and much more – have suddenly shut down to fight coronavirus. As a result, tens of millions of folks are stuck in their homes, wasting their talents, and contributing little to the world. An optimist would correctly remind us that we’re hardly starving, and we have Netflix. Yet an optimist should also gladly acknowledge that it would be awesome to suddenly recover all that we’ve lost. If the virus vanished overnight, a Niagara Falls of missing productivity would be unleashed.
Imagine, though, if we’d never known anything better than what we have today. If you claimed that we were missing trillions of dollars of gains, most people would be deeply pessimistic. Some would bemoan the fate of grocery stores if restaurants were legalized, or warn that releasing tens of millions of homebodies into the workforce would lead to catastrophic unemployment. The main mental block, though, is that people would have trouble visualizing a straightforward way to make us trillions of dollars richer.
If you can get over this mental block, if you can see what we’ve lost, then it’s only a small step further to see what we’re missing. If people were free to take a job anywhere on Earth, humanity would have more agriculture, more manufacturing, more services. We would have more restaurants, more homes, more elder care. We would have more doctors and more janitors, more meal delivery and more cars to deliver the meals. If coronavirus can eliminate 90% of the restaurant business, open borders can add 90% to the restaurant business. You’ve seen the former with your own eyes, so you should have no trouble seeing the latter with the eye of the mind.
To be fair, you could demur, “We’ve shut down most of the domestic labor market to prevent the spread of a horrible disease. Similarly, we shut down most of the international labor market to prevent something similarly horrible.” The difference, of course, is that the coronavirus is all too real, while the horrors of immigration are speculative at best. Indeed, on inspection they’re largely imaginary. And while many will now rush to add infectious disease to the list of social ills to blame on immigrants, that argument too makes little sense.
READER COMMENTS
Simon
Mar 26 2020 at 11:33am
A big loss is NOT the same as a big foregone gain. Marginal utility is decreasing in wealth. Marginal utility is decreasing in restaurants, janitors, agriculture, manufacturing, elder care, homes and meal delivery. Personally, I’m close to maxed out on those things, but I’m nowhere near maxed out on culture or social cohesion.
Simon
Mar 26 2020 at 11:38am
People care about Wealth+. Now that we’re great at producing wealth, we should expect people to have a higher marginal value of +. The kind of social and cultural uniformity sustained by borders is part of the +.
Mark Z
Mar 26 2020 at 1:38pm
Well I personally am pretty maxed out ‘social uniformity.’ I’m experiencing negative returns at the margin to increased social and cultural conformity, which I find rather stifling even at current levels. I would however love to be able to pay less for food and janitorial services.
Simon
Mar 27 2020 at 8:42pm
Could you please be more specific about what constitutes the negative returns you experience?
In all the places I’ve lived in the US, the level of social and cultural uniformity has been about zero. Maybe we’re talking about different things.
Warren Platts
Mar 28 2020 at 1:09pm
Well, Mark, I gotta appreciate your honesty: immigration raises the real wages of office dwellers by lowering the real wages of the working class. Good job!
Ghatanathoah
Mar 30 2020 at 11:12pm
@Warren Platts
It doesn’t make sense for immigration to lower the real wages of anybody if you think about it for a second.
The real wages of Americans of all classes are considerably higher than they were 200 years ago, in spite of a tremendous amount of population increase, caused by the birthrate, lowered death rate, and immigration. Every time the population increases, real wages go up.
I suspect what is going on is that having more people to work and invent makes everything cheaper, and this more than cancels out any nominal decreases in wages the working class suffers.
This means that even if you think the working class has a right to restrict population growth to jack up its wages (and I think it’s pretty obvious it doesn’t), doing so would be pointless because in the long run immigration will increase its wages.
James
Mar 26 2020 at 2:15pm
Suppose I value my culture far more than you value yours and there are lots and lots of people who feel as I do. Should the government make laws that promote/protect my culture at your expense? Or is your culture uniquely entitled to state protection?
Simon
Mar 27 2020 at 8:28pm
I think that what the government ought to do is more a question of rights than of value, but that said, cultural preservation doesn’t have to be a zero sum game. Preserving one culture doesn’t have to mean destroying another culture. There are many wonderful cultures on Earth and there’s plenty of room in the world for just about everyone.
American culture is more entitled to state protection by the American government than other cultures because the majority of Americans prefer American culture. Similarly, if a huge majority of Americans wanted a space program, that would go a long way towards justifying a government space program, or at least it would be more justifiable than a program which most Americans hated. If the government is going to spend our money, they should at least spend it on things we would like to have.
Ghatanathoah
Mar 30 2020 at 11:47pm
@Simon
The thing about American culture is that it is like Barbie dolls. There are a wide variety of Barbies, Malibu Barbie, Extreme Sports Barbie, Disco Fever Barbie, Totally Hair Barbie, etc. They are all the same basic doll with a few cosmetic variations.
A lot of times when immigrants arrive they don’t actually change American culture, anymore than Mattel actually changes Barbie. They just create a new variant of it. They add a few cosmetic elements of their own culture, but underneath it’s American culture. The same basic behavior patterns are there, the new holidays and food are like Barbie’s wardrobe.
The core American culture is tremendously valuable and needs to be preserved. I am not sure about the cosmetic elements. Modern Americans probably have more in common with modern Mexicans or Chinese than Pennsylvania Quakers from 1800 America had in common with Virginian Scots-Irish. If 1800s America could survive having Puritans, Quakers, Scots-Irish, and Southern Gentry all in one country, I think having modern people from other countries will be a cinch by comparison.
Stephen
Mar 26 2020 at 12:40pm
I do understand your argument, I really do, but please take one moment to assess how you sound in this moment to the unchurched. With everyone forbidden from interacting with everyone else and told to stay within their castles and pull up their drawbridges, only an economist will describe what’s going on as a teaching moment for open borders.
Kurt Schuler
Mar 26 2020 at 9:03pm
From another perspective, not a massive missed opportunity; rather, a gain achieved, or preserved.
BC
Mar 27 2020 at 1:11am
“Some would bemoan the fate of grocery stores if restaurants were legalized, or warn that releasing tens of millions of homebodies into the workforce would lead to catastrophic unemployment.”
This comment made me laugh, but it’s so true, sadly. People would also worry that all those former homebodies would disrupt the “culture” of the existing workplaces.
Caplan is also correct that we don’t appreciate what we are missing. I think we only understand the horrors of socialism because we can compare socialist societies to capitalist ones. Without South Korea and West Germany, life in North Korea and East Germany would have just seemed normal. People wouldn’t have known what they were missing. That’s also why it’s so hard in the relatively capitalist West to deregulate, not just in immigration but in so many other areas — to few freer countries to compare against.
Warren Platts
Mar 28 2020 at 1:07pm
This article goes to show that no matter what your preconceived beliefs were, the virus proves that you were right all along…
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