Contra Carl on Immigration and the Economy

A guest post by Levi Mitze-Circiumaru

I recently had a great interview on immigration with Noah Carl. Carl allowed me to present my arguments sequentially, allowing us to locate surprisingly large areas of agreement despite his immigration skepticism. Alas, this intellectual progress doesn’t really show up in Carl’s recent “Is ‘Immigration’ Good for the Economy?” When Bet On It reader Levi Mitze-Circiumaru sent me this critique, I offered to run it as a guest post. Here’s Levi.

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Noah Carl’s recent piece in Aporia, Is “‘Immigration’ Good for the Economy?,” contains some interesting data, but his takeaway from the observations and data he cites is poorly reasoned. Let’s take a look.

Noah clearly thinks that some migrants, especially low-skilled migrants, are harmful to their host country’s economy. In Noah’s words:

"Does everyone contribute equally to the economy? No. Can someone’s contribution to the economy be predicted based on factors like education and country of origin? Yes. Hence some types of immigration will be good for the economy, and some types will be bad.

"Immigrants aren’t a magical category of human that, simply in virtue of moving to another country, are destined to make that country richer. They may be more productive than the people who are already there, or they may be less productive. If they’re less productive, they’ll be bad for the economy."

Let’s interrogate this position with some questions about economic migrants.

If you are paying $20 per haircut and an immigrant moves into your neighborhood who offers the same cut for $15, are your personal economic interests harmed? If your country has 2 workers per retiree then receives economic migrants who raise the ratio to 2.3 per 1, are the retirees worse off? (This does not just kick the problem down the road if the migrants have high enough birth rates, either.) If you live in an advanced information economy where labor costs are some of the highest in the world, it’s hard to get affordable human services like childcare, elder care, gardening, handy man services, etc. Admitting, in particular, low-skilled migrant workers should help drive down labor costs and improve the living standards of the relatively high skilled native workers.

Is this exploitative? Not even close. The cheap foreign labor wants to work here because even low wages here are often much higher than wages in the countries they come from. Is this unfair to native low-skilled workers? It’s hard to see how free, open competition can be considered unfair. Would it be fair for me to go around with a gun chasing away those workers who compete with me for jobs? That sounds grossly unjust, not fair. If you want to appeal to nationalism and reverse classism to merely assert that the interests of native low-skilled workers trump the interests of foreign would-be migrants and native consumers in all contests, I’m afraid there is nothing to be said for you but that you are a bigot–not that I’m accusing Noah of bigotry. I don’t think he sees things in those terms.

But are these cherry-picked examples? Is immigration always beneficial? Noah writes, “Suppose half the people in France moved to Britain, and half the people in Britain moved to France. Wow, 50% immigration! Will that make France and Britain richer?” Or should we be worried that workers will move to countries where they can’t outcompete their native competition on price or quality? In this scenario migrants wouldn’t be able to find work and therefore wouldn’t gain a better life for themselves. Also, native consumers wouldn’t be benefited from lower cost or higher quality products and services offered by the migrants. Should we worry that, if anyone could immigrate anywhere, half of the USA would move to Venezuela and regret it? Or, since we have relatively free trade, should we be worried that the Brits will trade all their possessions to the French in exchange for all their possessions, just on a whim, leaving a costly mismatch of property to preferences in both countries? Is the fact that we can imagine such socially useless exchanges occurring under a regime of free trade evidence that laissez faire is not all it’s cracked up to be?

These worries are all exceedingly silly. The movement of people from one country to another or the exchange of goods between them, in and of itself, does not benefit economies (Noah’s correct but trivial point). However, policies of unrestricted immigration and free trade obviously do and for exactly the same reason. They allow for resources (human and material) to move from locales where they are of little value (low price, low productivity) to locales where they are of higher value (higher price, higher productivity). Far from having ambiguous effects, policies of free trade and unrestricted immigration have obviously positive net effects. Economic migrants in the real world are not “magical,” but the very fact that they choose to move is strong evidence that they are increasing productivity (for themselves and natives) by doing so.

To be fair, much of Noah’s post is focused on the negative fiscal effects of certain migrants on their host countries. I don’t doubt his data, but it’s important to remember that fiscal effects are not the only, let alone the most important, effects bearing on standard of living, which Noah rightly points out is what really matters when thinking about a policy’s effects on the economy. The key is productivity and migrants’ ability to produce more on net than they consume. Granted, this can be hindered by host country policies forbidding migrants to work. But resolving these conflicts by restricting immigration rather than restricting the government benefits provided to immigrants and ending prohibitions to employment is deeply inhumane.

There are millions upon millions of people who would move to a higher productivity country even if they knew they would never receive a single penny from their host country’s government. Many of these people are currently in life-threatening conditions of poverty, war, or persecution. Would-be migrants suffer profound injustice at the hands of foreign governments who assert ownership over entire continents by literally cordoning them off from the majority of the human race.