I am more sympathetic to Bryan's POV than Noah's here, but I think if you tell people that it is bigoted to favor their low-income countrymen over low-income foreigners or their high-income countrymen, most of them will proudly declare themselves to be bigots.
That's what I was thinking. Bryan and Levi are talking about the economics of migration almost exclusively, but Noah also considers social ramifications and natural preferences of people. Libertarians need to take people's preferences into consideration in their analyses because value is subjective after all. I completely agree that younger generations take much less issue with racial and even cultural diversity, but that's only so long as those cultures are subsumed by the "urban monoculture" that Simone and Malcolm Collins talk about. If they had to deal more frequently with people who don't at all share their language, values, or pastimes, I think they'd be alarmed at how "irrationally" upset they can't help but feel. And then there's the crime increases amongst certain demographics observed in some European countries in the past few years...
You evade mans power to focus is mind and reason or to evade focusing and rationalize. This is common human experience, shared equally by cannibals in North Borneo and mainstream economists. The terror of being responsible for one's own mind is virtually universal among cannibals in North Borneo and mainstream economists. Thus the absurdity of claiming that man knows reality prior to knowing reality. But, to the unfocused mind, no disaster is as terrifying as being responsible for focusing and reasoning. He would rather kill himself and/or you to evade it.
1. I think that both supporters and detractors of low skilled immigration overlook the Gulf countries model of low wage immigration: allow people to come in for 10-15 years, work, send remittances, then go home. No permanent residency, no immigration rights for their family, no need to provide a pension in the future, no need to pay for schools for their children, etc. It’s the best of both worlds.
2. I fully support the libertarian concept of unrestricted immigration in exchange for zero government support but that’s not what’s happening in practice. The current wave of immigrants get tons of government help, their kids get to go to local schools, and there’s an increasing pressure on tax payers to provide more and more every year. This doesn’t happen with legal, vetted immigrants.
3. Immigrants from some countries are objectively worse on average due to being more likely to be involved with crime and failing to find a job or learn the local language. You can support immigration from “good” countries while objecting to immigration from “bad” countries. At the very least you want hardcore behavioral vetting for immigrants from certain nations.
Not allowing immigrants to bring their families is a key to the Gulf model, I think. The moment you let kids into the picture, they will make friends with native kids, and it will go against the instincts of almost everybody to forcibly separate them when the parents' immigration visas expires.
An alternative to vetting is being really strict about deporting those who break the law, go unemployed for a certain amount of (relatively short) time or fail to pass a language test within X months of arrival. Not quite sure what the libertarian argument for requiring immigrant workers to learn the local language, though? (I personally support that very much, but them I'm a national conservative.)
In sum I think it's worth exploring a system where going to work abroad for a some time works as a modern day equivalent to supporting a family as a sailor, away for months or years at a time, but making much better money than one could at home.
I don’t think learning languages is particularly important as a libertarian but in practice not knowing the local language after 2-3 years of residency is a sign of poor integration. Which is fine if you’re just a temporary worker but a big problem if you’re not.
1) What is your plan for turning the USA into a Gulf Monarchy?
Like really, doesn't that require some constitutional amendments? What's your plan for getting them passed?
Are there any drawbacks to the Gulf Monarchy model of governance? Is there anything about the Middle East that can't be transferred or scaled to the west?
2) We literally had something called Prop 187 in California that called for just that. It was held up in court the moment it passed and once immigrants made Dems a permanent majority in CA even the state government stop trying to appeal the decision.
More generally, we already have an example of this in the USA. It was called Jim Crow. It proved unsustainable, even its Northern Version.
Having a huge portion of your population be second class citizens presents massive political and social risk, it has not worked well in the west.
1) the entire concept of a visa seems at odds with the concept of Open Borders.
When you attempt to separate families or turn away unaccompanied minors it inevitably involves “inhumane” actions. You’ll recall that when Trump tried to do it we were bombarded with endless talk of “children in cages”.
Migrants are going to want to bring their families with them, as well as form new families in country. Denying them that right will be seen as cruel and require the application of force in a way that is empirically democratically unacceptable.
Petro state dictatorships in the middle of the desert might be able to get away with that, but it’s not clear western democracies can. And there are a lot of drawbacks to being a petro state dictatorship.
For various reasons we seem OK with denying certain rights to non-residents we aren’t ok denying to residents. Once the immigrant is here the west has not shown that it can deny those rights, and this is a fact that one has to empirically accept. The only way to prevent “rights” creep is to keep them out altogether.
The loss is what exactely? Countries are not made wealthy by endless streams of very low productivity diminishing returns labor. You can’t get your nails done 30 times a day, even if you could somehow make this second class segregation system work.
That’s fine I guess for luxury hotels in petro states, but it’s not what makes the first world the first world.
"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?"
Yes. Presumably the person getting paid $15 for the haircut qualifies for Medicaid, sends their kid to a public school that they don't pay enough in taxes to fund, etc. The truth is that at low levels of productivity we have no clue what true cost is, because such peoples existence is heavily subsidized by the state. You pay for it indirectly with things like property and income taxes (and higher COL on things like rent, etc).
"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?"
People need subsidy when they are young and old. Immigrants both get old and have children.
Noah is correct to look at total lifetime net contribution.
"It’s hard to get affordable human services like childcare, elder care, gardening, handy man services, etc."
If taxes are lower then maybe you don't need to hire people to do these things. Maybe you can do them yourself because a spouse can stay home or you don't need to take a second job.
Again, we really don't have a clue what the true cost of low end labor is.
Lastly, I would note that lots of mid-skill jobs are beyond the capabilities of low IQ immigrants.
"However, a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the average IQ of a tradesperson is 103, which is slightly above average."
The average Hispanic immigrant is well below that, to say nothing of people from even worse parts of the third world.
We hired some people to built our deck and they sent out what seemed like some illegals from Home Depot. After a week of putzing around they left a half finished broken deck and nails all over my yard. The company had to apologize and send some white people to build the whole deck again from scratch.
I'm always amazed how little people understand how dumb a lot of people are. 83 IQ is the cutoff where the army says "you are not even useful as a human shield". Huge swaths of the earths population falls below that.
"Or should we be worried that workers will move to countries where they can’t outcompete their native competition on price or quality? "
If you're on Medicaid and having lots of other things paid for by other peoples taxes, you aren't competing on price. You are using government violence to subsidize your lifestyle. It's notable that immigrants overwhelmingly support additional government subsidy for themselves.
"But resolving these conflicts by restricting immigration rather than restricting the government benefits provided to immigrants"
HOW ARE YOU GOING TO DO THIS?!?!?!?!
Everywhere immigrants go they VOTE FOR MORE BENEFITS FOR THEMSELVES.
Look at what happened to California. We have an empirical example of what happens when you let in low IQ people. They vote for more benefit for themselves. It turns into a one party dysfunctional leftist state...just like the countries they left.
"Would-be migrants suffer profound injustice at the hands of foreign governments"
They support those governments. People in Latin America VOTE FOR THOSE GOVERNMENTS. Even in parts of the world with dictatorships, the people are broadly supportive of those governments and when they get democracy they largely vote for even worse government than the dictatorships (see Arab Spring).
Sorry, functional society and government is literally something only high IQ people are capable of. That's why we have IQ and the Wealth of Nations.
Your exchange with Noah reminds me of how dialogues like this are impossible. Noah knew all this stuff in your conversation, but wasn't willing to call you out on it live.
How about cultural impacts. I want to live in a place where *most* people are kind of like me and *mostly* share my values. I think most people are the same whether they want to admit it or not. Open borders would (or could plausibly) lead to most people where I live being far less educated and poorer than me and not speaking my language. Saying this is xenophobic or whatever doesn't change the fact of it. This issue is surely way more relevant for Europeans contemplating middle eastern immigrants.
> I want to live in a place where *most* people are kind of like me and *mostly* share my values.
Hence, his fear of outsiders. The word “outsiders,” to him, means the whole wide world beyond the confines of his village or town or gang—the world of all those people who do not live by his “rules.” He does not know why he feels that outsiders are a deadly threat to him and why they fill him with helpless terror. The threat is not existential, but psycho-epistemological: to deal with them requires that he rise above his “rules” to the level of abstract principles. He would die rather than attempt it.
-Ayn Rand
BTW, I, too, I want to live in a place where *most* people are kind of like me and *mostly* share my values. That's why I call for exiling Leftists and Rightists.
Meh. I was a big Ayn Rand fan and still appreciate her greatly, but this is simplistic. People need common ground with those they interact with daily. I want to be challenged at the margins but not have to constantly deal with people who disagree on fundamentals (axioms).
It's getting bad enough with other Americans who don't share common ground on the value of free speech, or try to argue about the existence of biological sex.
Thinking of yourself and others as rational animals is the common ground. Anything narrower, eg, race, ethnicity, sex, nationality, religion, is an evasion of man as having the power to focus his mind or to evade focusing his mind. Your false common common ground is a culture of unfocused minds with the same content in conflict with unfocused minds with a different content. Eg, the blood-drenched, 16th and 17th centuries religious wars between the unfocused minds of Catholics and Protestants. Or the virtually constant wars in all cultures for mans 300,000 years of history that have come close to ending because of capitalism which has spread the idea of man as a rational animal to virtually all cultures. Tragically, modern intellectuals, Left and Right, teach that man is an irrational animal comfortable only with people who share the same unfocused content. Youre trying to get high without having to pay.
'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'
I suspect most people (who aren't themselves would-be migrants) believe that the interests of native workers trump foreign would-be migrants. Does this really make them all bigots? All this really does is make the bar for bigotry very low.
Bryan - Slightly off topic here, but I’d like to take this opportunity to say that two nights ago I started reading your book Open Borders to my 9 year old daughter as a bedtime story. We’re both enjoying it and I she is fascinated. Of course it has its humorous parts and we love looking at the beautiful pictures together and acting out parts of the dialogue in character voices. I’ve never read past the first chapter so it’s exciting for me to read it with her and see her reaction to it. It’s probably a better book for me to read with her than to read alone, since I’m partial to non-fiction and haven’t ever been interested in comics. I probably haven’t read more than one or two comic books in my life. So Open Borders is quite eye opening for me. I see potential for this style of book--not sure what to call it, graphic novel, comic--as a way of reaching and teaching economics to a younger crowd, and especially good for families with children to read together.
So I’ve underestimated the book, at least as a book to teach economics to children. Sure, some of the dialogue is too sophisticated for my 9 year old, so I have to translate it for her. For example “Third World country” is abstract for her so I say “poor country.”
We’re only on chapter two, but I’m really impressed with your and Zach’s work.
The only graphic novel I’ve ever read all the way through is Zach’s Bea Wolf, which I read as a bedtime story to her a few months back. That was great.
I just realize Russ has probably never invited you on Econtalk to discuss Open Borders. This is unfortunate because this book has great potential for families and primary and secondary schools. Are you aware of any teachers using it in their lesson plans?
In scanning over Zach’s Econtalk interview for Bea Wolf I see this statement about the genre.
“15:19 Russ Roberts: Let's talk about poetry generally. Poetry is a bit out of fashion these days. I think you're one of a handful of poets to appear on EconTalk. I'm a huge poetry fan, especially for children: spent a lot of time reading poems--literally poems, but also rhyming books, Dr. Seuss being an obvious example, but also one of my favorite books, I'll just mention here, for children, Seven Silly Eaters, magnificent book. And, poetry has a musical quality to it. It seems almost designed, when it's rhyming or rhythmic, to worm its way into our brains in a way that prose does not. Tell me what you think about that, both for children and for adults. What are your thoughts on that?
Zach Weinersmith: Yeah. Poetry has gone through a similar process that comics have actually, where, at least in our culture--that is to say, like, Anglophone culture generally--it is considered either a kind of derelict art form for academics, or it is for children. And, I think that's unfortunate.”
Noah in his post addressing his critics, doesn't seem to understand where the inefficiency comes from. Here was part of my comment responding on that post "It’s not like Jeff Bezos has only two options: bring in a low-skilled immigrant or do the cleaning himself. He can hire a low-skilled native. And if he’s unable to find one willing to work at the prevailing wage, he can offer a higher wage." Is this not where the DWL occurs, that Jeff Bezos can surely afford to do that (with the effect being to shift the distribution of surplus), but on the margin there will be unrealized gains from trade.
You sort of address this point with "The non-fiscal effects of low-skilled immigration in the economy are largely distributional. By . . . in which case low-skilled immigration does increase the size of the pie, all else being equal. But this doesn’t seem like a particularly strong point.." With provided links, but the point is largely theoretical, as in all the additional surplus that would have gone to such labour, is part of the consumer surplus. The next point about "reducing the relative scarcity", is different from reducing barriers to trade, which is the point that the theoretical economic argument is making."
Importantly in his more recent post on diversity he seems to propose another social welfare function of sorts, without noting that his original argument was about what's "good for the economy" not some other social welfare function, he really should have explicitly mentioned the Kaldor–Hicks criterion in his original post.
"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."
Wouldn't the right conclusion, then, be to allow entry to those immigrants who we predict will produce more than they consume (taking into account the increased productivity that life in a rich nation often brings) and to refuse entry otherwise? We may have a factual disagreement about what percentage of immigrants fall into which category, and this may vary somewhat between different immigrant populations. But one would think that substantial numbers of immigrants in both categories exist.
To be frank in America's case, we need immigrants to lower housing costs. Materials and labor cost have risen rapidly the last few years even before 2020. On the other hand, the H1B visa program is titled to favor big tech companies, among whom are notoriously inefficient and doing layoffs, and we have a broken immigration system. For cheaper labor, we should have a work visa program not just for Microsoft, Google, etc, but so it doesn't cost $30 an hour for a painter when it cost just $10 15 years ago.
Good post. The gaps between being a fiscal drain (where the taxes you pay and government services you are expected to consume have a negative net present value to the government), being an economic drain (most likely to occur when the net fiscal drain outweighs the additional surplus you generate for others), and being an actual burden on society when counting everything are probably pretty large.
I take it Bryan / Levi think that being a fiscal drain alone is not sufficient to be denied entry, which may well be a minority position even among free marketeers. Personally, I am still unsure.
"... I’m afraid there is nothing to be said for you but that you are a bigot"
A bigot would be someone who thinks that the natives are better/outsiders worse simply because of their immutable characteristics.
"I was born in x so I'm better than people born in y".
However, the are reasonable and absolutely not bigoted arguments on why it would be okay to favor natives.
A public officer has the duty to advance the interest of the natives, not of foreigners.
An argument that helping foreigners is the right, moral thing to do is also reasonable, but completely unrelated to the interests of the natives who vote people into office.
That said, if the argument is that migration benefits both the natives AND the foreigners, then that's the argument that should be made, emphasizing the benefits to the natives, not the other way around.
That's how you convince people, NEVER by calling them bigots. Some people are, but most are not and this alienates them immediately.
If Kaplan only did not insist on totally unrestricted immigration! He just does not seem to accept the possibilities of externalities, particularly if the rate of immigration of certain kind of immigrants are "too high."
Arguing that a lot more immigration including more "low skilled" immigrants is beneficial sounds like something that can be supported with data. Arguing that immigration should be unrestricted sounds like a doctrine. Let's liberalize immigration (especially of high skilled) see how it works and then maybe liberalize some more.
>[Carl] some types of immigration will be good for the economy, and some types will be bad.
the goal of political economy was assumed to be the study of how to utilize these "resources" for "the common good....the unchallenged axiom that wealth is an anonymous, social, tribal product....The fact that the principal "resource" involved was man himself, that he was an entity of a specific nature with specific capacities and requirements, was given the most superficial attention, if any. Man was regarded simply as one of the factors of production, along with land, forests, or mines—as one of the less significant factors, since more study was devoted to the influence and quality of these others than to his role or quality.
The term low-skilled is often misused and misinterpreted. Because for example cleaners and nurses are categorised as low-skilled but are in practice doing more important jobs than for example bankers. You can have a life without a bank but it is hard to live without nurses and cleaners.
The willfull mindlessness of Leftists is a wonder to behold, virtually a miracle. How will nurses and cleaners be paid without bankers investing from savings? There is virtually no saving and investment in pre-capitalist economies. Thus the virtual equality of sustainable poverty. BTW, dirt-poor hunter-gatherers give more meat to the best hunters because, unlike
Leftists, they value life and they know some economics.
I am not sure what you mean. Cleaners and medical staff existed as during the medieval Europe even before established private banks. Also, alternatives to banks are modern credit card companies as Revolut and cryptocurrencies as Bitcoin. The point is that low-skilled socioeconmic category is just as important as high-skilled.
This is a point where libertarians have an especially valuable contribution to make. Since we value private property, the principled approach would be to have an immigration system which is based on invitation by citizens but also places responsibility on the inviter for any transgressions of the invitee until they gain citizenship. And as for citizenship requirements, they should of course expect some basic understanding of the civic process, customs, and that they speak English close to fluently. Not only does this respect private property, but it also sets the right incentives for those deciding to invite people into the country.
That's a principled approach indeed. Whenever I hear a left-liberals talk about the need to let in refugees and economic migrants for moral reasons, and how that is actually supposed to benefit our society, I feel the urge to ask them if they'd like to personally take legal and economic responsibility for any of these people. (For some inexplicable reason they tend to live in very white, homogenous neighbourhoods themselves.)
I have some amount of sympathy for allowing migrants to "homestead" public property since I think the concept of public property is illegitimate, but I know the state won't go for that.
Thanks for sharing this. I responded to criticisms of my article here: https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/was-i-wrong-about-low-skilled-immigration
I am more sympathetic to Bryan's POV than Noah's here, but I think if you tell people that it is bigoted to favor their low-income countrymen over low-income foreigners or their high-income countrymen, most of them will proudly declare themselves to be bigots.
That's what I was thinking. Bryan and Levi are talking about the economics of migration almost exclusively, but Noah also considers social ramifications and natural preferences of people. Libertarians need to take people's preferences into consideration in their analyses because value is subjective after all. I completely agree that younger generations take much less issue with racial and even cultural diversity, but that's only so long as those cultures are subsumed by the "urban monoculture" that Simone and Malcolm Collins talk about. If they had to deal more frequently with people who don't at all share their language, values, or pastimes, I think they'd be alarmed at how "irrationally" upset they can't help but feel. And then there's the crime increases amongst certain demographics observed in some European countries in the past few years...
> natural preferences of people.
You evade mans power to focus is mind and reason or to evade focusing and rationalize. This is common human experience, shared equally by cannibals in North Borneo and mainstream economists. The terror of being responsible for one's own mind is virtually universal among cannibals in North Borneo and mainstream economists. Thus the absurdity of claiming that man knows reality prior to knowing reality. But, to the unfocused mind, no disaster is as terrifying as being responsible for focusing and reasoning. He would rather kill himself and/or you to evade it.
1. I think that both supporters and detractors of low skilled immigration overlook the Gulf countries model of low wage immigration: allow people to come in for 10-15 years, work, send remittances, then go home. No permanent residency, no immigration rights for their family, no need to provide a pension in the future, no need to pay for schools for their children, etc. It’s the best of both worlds.
2. I fully support the libertarian concept of unrestricted immigration in exchange for zero government support but that’s not what’s happening in practice. The current wave of immigrants get tons of government help, their kids get to go to local schools, and there’s an increasing pressure on tax payers to provide more and more every year. This doesn’t happen with legal, vetted immigrants.
3. Immigrants from some countries are objectively worse on average due to being more likely to be involved with crime and failing to find a job or learn the local language. You can support immigration from “good” countries while objecting to immigration from “bad” countries. At the very least you want hardcore behavioral vetting for immigrants from certain nations.
Not allowing immigrants to bring their families is a key to the Gulf model, I think. The moment you let kids into the picture, they will make friends with native kids, and it will go against the instincts of almost everybody to forcibly separate them when the parents' immigration visas expires.
An alternative to vetting is being really strict about deporting those who break the law, go unemployed for a certain amount of (relatively short) time or fail to pass a language test within X months of arrival. Not quite sure what the libertarian argument for requiring immigrant workers to learn the local language, though? (I personally support that very much, but them I'm a national conservative.)
In sum I think it's worth exploring a system where going to work abroad for a some time works as a modern day equivalent to supporting a family as a sailor, away for months or years at a time, but making much better money than one could at home.
I don’t think learning languages is particularly important as a libertarian but in practice not knowing the local language after 2-3 years of residency is a sign of poor integration. Which is fine if you’re just a temporary worker but a big problem if you’re not.
1) What is your plan for turning the USA into a Gulf Monarchy?
Like really, doesn't that require some constitutional amendments? What's your plan for getting them passed?
Are there any drawbacks to the Gulf Monarchy model of governance? Is there anything about the Middle East that can't be transferred or scaled to the west?
2) We literally had something called Prop 187 in California that called for just that. It was held up in court the moment it passed and once immigrants made Dems a permanent majority in CA even the state government stop trying to appeal the decision.
More generally, we already have an example of this in the USA. It was called Jim Crow. It proved unsustainable, even its Northern Version.
Having a huge portion of your population be second class citizens presents massive political and social risk, it has not worked well in the west.
3) Bryan things this is racist and evil.
1. You can stop issuing dependency visas without changing the Constitution.
2. The easiest way to avoid this is stronger border enforcement. Build the wall, etc.
3. I think Bryan under appreciated the negative impacts of certain groups of immigrants.
1) the entire concept of a visa seems at odds with the concept of Open Borders.
When you attempt to separate families or turn away unaccompanied minors it inevitably involves “inhumane” actions. You’ll recall that when Trump tried to do it we were bombarded with endless talk of “children in cages”.
Migrants are going to want to bring their families with them, as well as form new families in country. Denying them that right will be seen as cruel and require the application of force in a way that is empirically democratically unacceptable.
Petro state dictatorships in the middle of the desert might be able to get away with that, but it’s not clear western democracies can. And there are a lot of drawbacks to being a petro state dictatorship.
For various reasons we seem OK with denying certain rights to non-residents we aren’t ok denying to residents. Once the immigrant is here the west has not shown that it can deny those rights, and this is a fact that one has to empirically accept. The only way to prevent “rights” creep is to keep them out altogether.
The loss is what exactely? Countries are not made wealthy by endless streams of very low productivity diminishing returns labor. You can’t get your nails done 30 times a day, even if you could somehow make this second class segregation system work.
That’s fine I guess for luxury hotels in petro states, but it’s not what makes the first world the first world.
"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?"
Yes. Presumably the person getting paid $15 for the haircut qualifies for Medicaid, sends their kid to a public school that they don't pay enough in taxes to fund, etc. The truth is that at low levels of productivity we have no clue what true cost is, because such peoples existence is heavily subsidized by the state. You pay for it indirectly with things like property and income taxes (and higher COL on things like rent, etc).
"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?"
People need subsidy when they are young and old. Immigrants both get old and have children.
Noah is correct to look at total lifetime net contribution.
"It’s hard to get affordable human services like childcare, elder care, gardening, handy man services, etc."
If taxes are lower then maybe you don't need to hire people to do these things. Maybe you can do them yourself because a spouse can stay home or you don't need to take a second job.
Again, we really don't have a clue what the true cost of low end labor is.
Lastly, I would note that lots of mid-skill jobs are beyond the capabilities of low IQ immigrants.
"However, a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the average IQ of a tradesperson is 103, which is slightly above average."
The average Hispanic immigrant is well below that, to say nothing of people from even worse parts of the third world.
We hired some people to built our deck and they sent out what seemed like some illegals from Home Depot. After a week of putzing around they left a half finished broken deck and nails all over my yard. The company had to apologize and send some white people to build the whole deck again from scratch.
I'm always amazed how little people understand how dumb a lot of people are. 83 IQ is the cutoff where the army says "you are not even useful as a human shield". Huge swaths of the earths population falls below that.
"Or should we be worried that workers will move to countries where they can’t outcompete their native competition on price or quality? "
If you're on Medicaid and having lots of other things paid for by other peoples taxes, you aren't competing on price. You are using government violence to subsidize your lifestyle. It's notable that immigrants overwhelmingly support additional government subsidy for themselves.
"But resolving these conflicts by restricting immigration rather than restricting the government benefits provided to immigrants"
HOW ARE YOU GOING TO DO THIS?!?!?!?!
Everywhere immigrants go they VOTE FOR MORE BENEFITS FOR THEMSELVES.
Look at what happened to California. We have an empirical example of what happens when you let in low IQ people. They vote for more benefit for themselves. It turns into a one party dysfunctional leftist state...just like the countries they left.
"Would-be migrants suffer profound injustice at the hands of foreign governments"
They support those governments. People in Latin America VOTE FOR THOSE GOVERNMENTS. Even in parts of the world with dictatorships, the people are broadly supportive of those governments and when they get democracy they largely vote for even worse government than the dictatorships (see Arab Spring).
Sorry, functional society and government is literally something only high IQ people are capable of. That's why we have IQ and the Wealth of Nations.
Your exchange with Noah reminds me of how dialogues like this are impossible. Noah knew all this stuff in your conversation, but wasn't willing to call you out on it live.
How about cultural impacts. I want to live in a place where *most* people are kind of like me and *mostly* share my values. I think most people are the same whether they want to admit it or not. Open borders would (or could plausibly) lead to most people where I live being far less educated and poorer than me and not speaking my language. Saying this is xenophobic or whatever doesn't change the fact of it. This issue is surely way more relevant for Europeans contemplating middle eastern immigrants.
> I want to live in a place where *most* people are kind of like me and *mostly* share my values.
Hence, his fear of outsiders. The word “outsiders,” to him, means the whole wide world beyond the confines of his village or town or gang—the world of all those people who do not live by his “rules.” He does not know why he feels that outsiders are a deadly threat to him and why they fill him with helpless terror. The threat is not existential, but psycho-epistemological: to deal with them requires that he rise above his “rules” to the level of abstract principles. He would die rather than attempt it.
-Ayn Rand
BTW, I, too, I want to live in a place where *most* people are kind of like me and *mostly* share my values. That's why I call for exiling Leftists and Rightists.
Meh. I was a big Ayn Rand fan and still appreciate her greatly, but this is simplistic. People need common ground with those they interact with daily. I want to be challenged at the margins but not have to constantly deal with people who disagree on fundamentals (axioms).
It's getting bad enough with other Americans who don't share common ground on the value of free speech, or try to argue about the existence of biological sex.
Thinking of yourself and others as rational animals is the common ground. Anything narrower, eg, race, ethnicity, sex, nationality, religion, is an evasion of man as having the power to focus his mind or to evade focusing his mind. Your false common common ground is a culture of unfocused minds with the same content in conflict with unfocused minds with a different content. Eg, the blood-drenched, 16th and 17th centuries religious wars between the unfocused minds of Catholics and Protestants. Or the virtually constant wars in all cultures for mans 300,000 years of history that have come close to ending because of capitalism which has spread the idea of man as a rational animal to virtually all cultures. Tragically, modern intellectuals, Left and Right, teach that man is an irrational animal comfortable only with people who share the same unfocused content. Youre trying to get high without having to pay.
'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'
I suspect most people (who aren't themselves would-be migrants) believe that the interests of native workers trump foreign would-be migrants. Does this really make them all bigots? All this really does is make the bar for bigotry very low.
Bryan - Slightly off topic here, but I’d like to take this opportunity to say that two nights ago I started reading your book Open Borders to my 9 year old daughter as a bedtime story. We’re both enjoying it and I she is fascinated. Of course it has its humorous parts and we love looking at the beautiful pictures together and acting out parts of the dialogue in character voices. I’ve never read past the first chapter so it’s exciting for me to read it with her and see her reaction to it. It’s probably a better book for me to read with her than to read alone, since I’m partial to non-fiction and haven’t ever been interested in comics. I probably haven’t read more than one or two comic books in my life. So Open Borders is quite eye opening for me. I see potential for this style of book--not sure what to call it, graphic novel, comic--as a way of reaching and teaching economics to a younger crowd, and especially good for families with children to read together.
So I’ve underestimated the book, at least as a book to teach economics to children. Sure, some of the dialogue is too sophisticated for my 9 year old, so I have to translate it for her. For example “Third World country” is abstract for her so I say “poor country.”
We’re only on chapter two, but I’m really impressed with your and Zach’s work.
The only graphic novel I’ve ever read all the way through is Zach’s Bea Wolf, which I read as a bedtime story to her a few months back. That was great.
I just realize Russ has probably never invited you on Econtalk to discuss Open Borders. This is unfortunate because this book has great potential for families and primary and secondary schools. Are you aware of any teachers using it in their lesson plans?
In scanning over Zach’s Econtalk interview for Bea Wolf I see this statement about the genre.
“15:19 Russ Roberts: Let's talk about poetry generally. Poetry is a bit out of fashion these days. I think you're one of a handful of poets to appear on EconTalk. I'm a huge poetry fan, especially for children: spent a lot of time reading poems--literally poems, but also rhyming books, Dr. Seuss being an obvious example, but also one of my favorite books, I'll just mention here, for children, Seven Silly Eaters, magnificent book. And, poetry has a musical quality to it. It seems almost designed, when it's rhyming or rhythmic, to worm its way into our brains in a way that prose does not. Tell me what you think about that, both for children and for adults. What are your thoughts on that?
Zach Weinersmith: Yeah. Poetry has gone through a similar process that comics have actually, where, at least in our culture--that is to say, like, Anglophone culture generally--it is considered either a kind of derelict art form for academics, or it is for children. And, I think that's unfortunate.”
https://www.econtalk.org/zach-weinersmith-on-beowulf-and-bea-wolf/#audio-highlights
Any thoughts on why comic-style books are viewed this way in America, but apparently better in non-Anglophone countries?
Noah in his post addressing his critics, doesn't seem to understand where the inefficiency comes from. Here was part of my comment responding on that post "It’s not like Jeff Bezos has only two options: bring in a low-skilled immigrant or do the cleaning himself. He can hire a low-skilled native. And if he’s unable to find one willing to work at the prevailing wage, he can offer a higher wage." Is this not where the DWL occurs, that Jeff Bezos can surely afford to do that (with the effect being to shift the distribution of surplus), but on the margin there will be unrealized gains from trade.
You sort of address this point with "The non-fiscal effects of low-skilled immigration in the economy are largely distributional. By . . . in which case low-skilled immigration does increase the size of the pie, all else being equal. But this doesn’t seem like a particularly strong point.." With provided links, but the point is largely theoretical, as in all the additional surplus that would have gone to such labour, is part of the consumer surplus. The next point about "reducing the relative scarcity", is different from reducing barriers to trade, which is the point that the theoretical economic argument is making."
Importantly in his more recent post on diversity he seems to propose another social welfare function of sorts, without noting that his original argument was about what's "good for the economy" not some other social welfare function, he really should have explicitly mentioned the Kaldor–Hicks criterion in his original post.
"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."
Wouldn't the right conclusion, then, be to allow entry to those immigrants who we predict will produce more than they consume (taking into account the increased productivity that life in a rich nation often brings) and to refuse entry otherwise? We may have a factual disagreement about what percentage of immigrants fall into which category, and this may vary somewhat between different immigrant populations. But one would think that substantial numbers of immigrants in both categories exist.
If we state asking that question, most of the low IQ third world will fail, and most of the high IQ world doesn't want to immigrate.
To be frank in America's case, we need immigrants to lower housing costs. Materials and labor cost have risen rapidly the last few years even before 2020. On the other hand, the H1B visa program is titled to favor big tech companies, among whom are notoriously inefficient and doing layoffs, and we have a broken immigration system. For cheaper labor, we should have a work visa program not just for Microsoft, Google, etc, but so it doesn't cost $30 an hour for a painter when it cost just $10 15 years ago.
"Materials and labor cost have risen rapidly the last few years"
These things have never been lower as a % of the cost of housing. It's all land and taxes and regs bro.
Good post. The gaps between being a fiscal drain (where the taxes you pay and government services you are expected to consume have a negative net present value to the government), being an economic drain (most likely to occur when the net fiscal drain outweighs the additional surplus you generate for others), and being an actual burden on society when counting everything are probably pretty large.
I take it Bryan / Levi think that being a fiscal drain alone is not sufficient to be denied entry, which may well be a minority position even among free marketeers. Personally, I am still unsure.
"... I’m afraid there is nothing to be said for you but that you are a bigot"
A bigot would be someone who thinks that the natives are better/outsiders worse simply because of their immutable characteristics.
"I was born in x so I'm better than people born in y".
However, the are reasonable and absolutely not bigoted arguments on why it would be okay to favor natives.
A public officer has the duty to advance the interest of the natives, not of foreigners.
An argument that helping foreigners is the right, moral thing to do is also reasonable, but completely unrelated to the interests of the natives who vote people into office.
That said, if the argument is that migration benefits both the natives AND the foreigners, then that's the argument that should be made, emphasizing the benefits to the natives, not the other way around.
That's how you convince people, NEVER by calling them bigots. Some people are, but most are not and this alienates them immediately.
If Kaplan only did not insist on totally unrestricted immigration! He just does not seem to accept the possibilities of externalities, particularly if the rate of immigration of certain kind of immigrants are "too high."
Arguing that a lot more immigration including more "low skilled" immigrants is beneficial sounds like something that can be supported with data. Arguing that immigration should be unrestricted sounds like a doctrine. Let's liberalize immigration (especially of high skilled) see how it works and then maybe liberalize some more.
>[Carl] some types of immigration will be good for the economy, and some types will be bad.
the goal of political economy was assumed to be the study of how to utilize these "resources" for "the common good....the unchallenged axiom that wealth is an anonymous, social, tribal product....The fact that the principal "resource" involved was man himself, that he was an entity of a specific nature with specific capacities and requirements, was given the most superficial attention, if any. Man was regarded simply as one of the factors of production, along with land, forests, or mines—as one of the less significant factors, since more study was devoted to the influence and quality of these others than to his role or quality.
-Ayn Rand
The term low-skilled is often misused and misinterpreted. Because for example cleaners and nurses are categorised as low-skilled but are in practice doing more important jobs than for example bankers. You can have a life without a bank but it is hard to live without nurses and cleaners.
The willfull mindlessness of Leftists is a wonder to behold, virtually a miracle. How will nurses and cleaners be paid without bankers investing from savings? There is virtually no saving and investment in pre-capitalist economies. Thus the virtual equality of sustainable poverty. BTW, dirt-poor hunter-gatherers give more meat to the best hunters because, unlike
Leftists, they value life and they know some economics.
I am not sure what you mean. Cleaners and medical staff existed as during the medieval Europe even before established private banks. Also, alternatives to banks are modern credit card companies as Revolut and cryptocurrencies as Bitcoin. The point is that low-skilled socioeconmic category is just as important as high-skilled.
This is a point where libertarians have an especially valuable contribution to make. Since we value private property, the principled approach would be to have an immigration system which is based on invitation by citizens but also places responsibility on the inviter for any transgressions of the invitee until they gain citizenship. And as for citizenship requirements, they should of course expect some basic understanding of the civic process, customs, and that they speak English close to fluently. Not only does this respect private property, but it also sets the right incentives for those deciding to invite people into the country.
That's a principled approach indeed. Whenever I hear a left-liberals talk about the need to let in refugees and economic migrants for moral reasons, and how that is actually supposed to benefit our society, I feel the urge to ask them if they'd like to personally take legal and economic responsibility for any of these people. (For some inexplicable reason they tend to live in very white, homogenous neighbourhoods themselves.)
> responsibility on the inviter for any transgressions of the invitee until they gain citizenship.
Lets apply that to the native-born.
I have some amount of sympathy for allowing migrants to "homestead" public property since I think the concept of public property is illegitimate, but I know the state won't go for that.