I also wonder what Caplan thinks of recent data that shows 32% of Hispanics are on food stamps, compared to only 11% of Whites. And that Hispanic EBT recipients receive greater benefits on average.
Surely any calculus on open borders should include the performance of the 2nd/3rd generation.
While I agree with probably 95%+ of BC’s positions, I do not on unlimited immigraton.
What BC fails to indicate about his claims about U.S. immigrants being net positive in his linked piece is that most of the people studied wanted to come here when coming here was *hard*.
There is little reason to believe that when you combine LITERALLY open borders with a welfare state that there would remain net positive fiscal effects by large majorities of those who come here.
To say nothing of the difficulty in the modern age of integrating the huge numbers of people who would arrive once this policy was official.
And to be clear, once we shut down illegal immigration, I am very open to fairly high levels of legal immigration, including nearly unlimited high-skill immigration and a decent number of lower-skill immigrants as well. Despite our generous welfare state. But this is very different from literally unlimited immigration.
It's still hard to come here. Indeed, it's probably harder than at any point in the past because it's not the transport which makes it hard but adopting to the new country and for most of our history we had areas you could just go and live with people who had the same language, behaviors etc etc of your homeland. Sure, there is a large Spanish speaking population in the us but we don't really have the isolated communities to the same degree where you could exist as if you hadn't moved.
Most of what makes it difficult is adapting to a different language, customs, giving up your friends, social network etc.. Sure, those costs are much smaller if you come from Canada but so are the net benefits. If you are leaving the global south most of the skills you've learned for managing your life don't apply anymore and you have to master a whole new system of doing things.
--
But ultimately, I think it's a mistake to focus on where the ultimate line gets drawn. Just make immigration easier until you actually reach the point where immigrants are net drains on the economy.
It IS still not easy to come here, I agree, since we have so little LEGAL immigration few can enter that way (and there is ZERO political will to increase legal immigration mostly given the enormous amount of illegal immigration), and since most of the ILLEGAL immigration is through drug cartels where the illegals are in debt to them.
Are any of your arguments meant to endorse today’s ILLEGAL immigration?
If so, we have nothing to discuss, as your position is much more indefensible than BC’s.
If not, then despite all your words, it sounds like we are pretty much agreeing on policy: allow a lot more legal immigration, just don’t make it unlimited where there is a very strong incentive for people to come and be a drain not on the *economy*, but on the taxpayers paying for the generous welfare benefits and education benefits.
Though I still disagree strongly with the “it’d still be hard” case you are trying to make above if we had open borders. People could come and not speak the language as there would be many of their cohort in the same boat with whom they would have common ground, culture, language, etc.
In particular, if you are coming from a very poor place, even if their lives here would be hard relative to what you and I are used to, there is no reason at all to think that they would be hard relative to what those poorest billions are used to in their own countries, again given the extremely generous safety net here for health and education in particular.
And even if they were never made citizens, if their children born here automatically were, very soon we would almost certainly have a borderline-socialist country to the left of all of those in Europe today. You - and Bernie Sanders and AOC - might wish that, but I do not.
Imagine the big cities struggling to deal with the crush of immigrants that would arrive once this policy started, considering how bitterly Democrat mayors of sanctuary cities complain about the relatively tiny number of the illegal immigrants who have arrived in their cities under border czar Kamala’s last 3.5 years worth of illegal policy.
That Caplan compares reproduction to immigration shows how weak his argument is. In reproduction, the mother always has a physical and emotional cost, even if others pay for the expenses.
In immigration, it is all upside for the poor migrant, especially so if the risk of family separation is removed. And since there are billions of people who can personally benefit from making a claim on the American social safety net, there is essentially unlimited global demand for it, unless immigration barriers exist.
I would just say there's an enormous practical difficulty in regulating reproduction. You can't just put a barrier on the border and check people at that specific place.
“That Caplan compares reproduction to immigration shows how weak his argument is.”
No, here I disagree. BC’s argument is in that sense a consistent purist libertarian argument about freedom.
What his argument misses is that good culture (norms and institutions…) matters, and that fully open borders in conjunction with the reality of a generous welfare state risks with high probability destroying good cultures.
Regarding the “Immigration Road Map” (in the cartoon). A shorter and more libertarian version seems possible:
Step 1. In order to stop the negative externalities on the current population (by giving “public property” access to everyone in the world) privatise everything among the current population.
Step 2. Open borders: i.e., no limit on who can invite anyone onto their private property.
What an absolutely *brilliant* response! I would LOVE to hear Bryan respond on *why* this one IS different (since Bryan is not insane, he will clearly agree that it is)…
The US is now a bankrupt welfare / warfare state blessed with regulatory quagmire present at all levels of government, essentially a green theocracy, a swelling public sector, an education system feeding a guild socialism of regulated professions and trades where cultural Marxism is rampant and you appear to be criticizing Friedman's priorities of policies by singling out open borders. Open borders were likely not particularly high on his list for good reason.
This is what I was going to comment on as well - there's a verbal sleight of hand happening where the differences between humans and goods are ignored. Someone gets paid for goods in a voluntary transaction. I guess coyotes get paid to help people to covertly cross the border, but that is very much not receiving a shipment of steel for the dollars a business sent to China.
No, while I disagree with BC on this, it is not a verbal sleight of hand he is using. There is indeed a large economic cost to preventing a lot more immigration. Most - but by no means all - of it is borne by those not allowed to immigrate. On that point, BC is 100% correct.
Where he’s wrong is in the large not-directly-measurable (especially in the short run) costs of the high probability risk to culture (norms and institutions) to a country that allows unlimited migration, especially when done in the context of a generous welfare state (and especially where children born in the country automatically become citizens even if their parents are not).
"Undeniably, some people take advantage of the welfare state. But at least in the U.S., a supermajority of immigrants still prefer to work."
But the marginal increase in payroll tax revenues associated with working are not sufficient to pay for the marginal increase in the present value of future entitlement benefits associated with working. Each person added to the population of future beneficiaries, whether by immigration or by birth, only increases the staggering and unsustainable burden of unfunded liabilities (which is already a large multiple of the funded federal debt) and debt service costs. The only decision remaining open to politicians is whether they intend to honestly repudiate their unsustainable entitlement promises or to hyperinflate the dollar in a vain attempt to evade repudiation for a short while.
Even worse, state promises of future economic security have deterred workers (and everyone else) from saving over the past six decades, while the excess of payroll tax revenues over current trust fund expenditures generated in prior decades were squandered on financing greater government spending instead of funding productive investments. The increase of transfers as a percent of GDP has come almost entirely at the expense of the share of GDP devoted to net investment, which in turn means that capital goods formation was curtailed, the rate of real GDP growth has stagnated, and people who earn their incomes from complementary factors of production (especially labor) have seen their real incomes decline.
The correct retort to Friedman and to contemporary anti-immigration populists is that the deindustrialization of America and the decline of the middle class is the fault of Social Security, Medicare, and their financing via fiat money creation supporting debt monetization, not the fault of immigrants or of bad trade deals with China. Likewise, the growing inability of Western nations to assimilate immigrants is largely caused by welfare statism and by laws against private discrimination, which disincentivizes native-born and immigrants alike to voluntarily adjust their language and cultural norms to facilitate greater cooperation with one another.
1) In most welfare states, fertility rates among the poor are pretty low, usually right around replacement. If they were having 10 kids the narrative might well be different. There is hand wringing in Israel over the ultra orthodox, and Palestinian birthrates obviously have impacted the prospects of integrating them.
2) It's just plain easier to exclude immigrants then to police peoples fertility.
3) Willingness to work is meaningless. Productive work makes people rich, not work. Labor participation rates are high in poor countries.
4) Friedmen is correct that we can't have a Jim Crow slave caste in this country. And I know what you know this too Bryan! It's one thing to call for a slave caste on your blog. It's another to go on CNN or run for office and say "yes, we need a rightless underclass of brown worker units." You know it wouldn't fly.
Guest workers are not slaves. They were not kidnapped and brought here, they came over voluntarily. America already had a closer analogy near its founding: indentured servants.
>Still, “I believe in free trade, but not unless other countries embrace free trade, too” structurally parallels, “I believe in open borders, but not unless we abolish the welfare state, too.”
Pure wordcellery; the payoff matrices are different
Friedman's underlying point that you can't have low cost immigration (for the immigrant) and generous welfare is completely valid -- it's just that immigration already has very large costs that aren't imposed by the government.
I can imagine a time in the future where digital life (VR etc) is available even to the global poor to such a degree it renders the costs of moving trivial (don't lose friends, no language or cultural barriers etc) at which point it might become true that you couldn't combine generous welfare with relatively easy immigration. However that's also a world in which nation states themselves start to make much less sense.
“…that's also a world in which nation states themselves start to make much less sense.”
Uh, no, digital life being available to the global poor at very low cost doesn’t make nation states cease to make sense, when given human nature there will continue to be thugs and demagogues (some based on religion, some not), who seek to plunder the wealth of others and/or force them to live under their boot.
Maybe the welfare state isn't a barrier to more immigration. But wouldn't you need to solve the issues you raise in Build Baby Build at least simultaneously, if not before, open borders?
Given that the tax burden is overwhelmingly for the native-born elderly, perhaps an even better analogy than freedom of reproduction is freedom of retirement.
Draconian restrictions on the right to have children are not necessary because of how easy it is to use the availability of birth control and persuasion to limit births. Most people want sex, not children.
Friedman > Caplan
I also wonder what Caplan thinks of recent data that shows 32% of Hispanics are on food stamps, compared to only 11% of Whites. And that Hispanic EBT recipients receive greater benefits on average.
Surely any calculus on open borders should include the performance of the 2nd/3rd generation.
https://www.nber.org/books-and-chapters/race-ethnicity-and-economic-statistics-21st-century/race-ethnicity-and-measurement-error
I suppose that supstantive engagement with the topic is too much to ask.
Bryan and I had a five-part exchange on open borders:
https://www.betonit.ai/p/klein-on-immigration-the-last-word
Thanks for the reference! It was a great back and forth.
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE ask Bryan the question JC Lester suggests below: should Israel have open borders?
Then ask him why the basic reasoning doesn’t also apply to unlimited immigration into other countries.
I forwarded the question to Bryan.
https://ibb.co/YtnyHNR
While I agree with probably 95%+ of BC’s positions, I do not on unlimited immigraton.
What BC fails to indicate about his claims about U.S. immigrants being net positive in his linked piece is that most of the people studied wanted to come here when coming here was *hard*.
There is little reason to believe that when you combine LITERALLY open borders with a welfare state that there would remain net positive fiscal effects by large majorities of those who come here.
To say nothing of the difficulty in the modern age of integrating the huge numbers of people who would arrive once this policy was official.
And to be clear, once we shut down illegal immigration, I am very open to fairly high levels of legal immigration, including nearly unlimited high-skill immigration and a decent number of lower-skill immigrants as well. Despite our generous welfare state. But this is very different from literally unlimited immigration.
Milton Friedman had this correct.
It's still hard to come here. Indeed, it's probably harder than at any point in the past because it's not the transport which makes it hard but adopting to the new country and for most of our history we had areas you could just go and live with people who had the same language, behaviors etc etc of your homeland. Sure, there is a large Spanish speaking population in the us but we don't really have the isolated communities to the same degree where you could exist as if you hadn't moved.
Most of what makes it difficult is adapting to a different language, customs, giving up your friends, social network etc.. Sure, those costs are much smaller if you come from Canada but so are the net benefits. If you are leaving the global south most of the skills you've learned for managing your life don't apply anymore and you have to master a whole new system of doing things.
--
But ultimately, I think it's a mistake to focus on where the ultimate line gets drawn. Just make immigration easier until you actually reach the point where immigrants are net drains on the economy.
It IS still not easy to come here, I agree, since we have so little LEGAL immigration few can enter that way (and there is ZERO political will to increase legal immigration mostly given the enormous amount of illegal immigration), and since most of the ILLEGAL immigration is through drug cartels where the illegals are in debt to them.
Are any of your arguments meant to endorse today’s ILLEGAL immigration?
If so, we have nothing to discuss, as your position is much more indefensible than BC’s.
If not, then despite all your words, it sounds like we are pretty much agreeing on policy: allow a lot more legal immigration, just don’t make it unlimited where there is a very strong incentive for people to come and be a drain not on the *economy*, but on the taxpayers paying for the generous welfare benefits and education benefits.
Though I still disagree strongly with the “it’d still be hard” case you are trying to make above if we had open borders. People could come and not speak the language as there would be many of their cohort in the same boat with whom they would have common ground, culture, language, etc.
In particular, if you are coming from a very poor place, even if their lives here would be hard relative to what you and I are used to, there is no reason at all to think that they would be hard relative to what those poorest billions are used to in their own countries, again given the extremely generous safety net here for health and education in particular.
And even if they were never made citizens, if their children born here automatically were, very soon we would almost certainly have a borderline-socialist country to the left of all of those in Europe today. You - and Bernie Sanders and AOC - might wish that, but I do not.
Imagine the big cities struggling to deal with the crush of immigrants that would arrive once this policy started, considering how bitterly Democrat mayors of sanctuary cities complain about the relatively tiny number of the illegal immigrants who have arrived in their cities under border czar Kamala’s last 3.5 years worth of illegal policy.
That Caplan compares reproduction to immigration shows how weak his argument is. In reproduction, the mother always has a physical and emotional cost, even if others pay for the expenses.
In immigration, it is all upside for the poor migrant, especially so if the risk of family separation is removed. And since there are billions of people who can personally benefit from making a claim on the American social safety net, there is essentially unlimited global demand for it, unless immigration barriers exist.
I would just say there's an enormous practical difficulty in regulating reproduction. You can't just put a barrier on the border and check people at that specific place.
“That Caplan compares reproduction to immigration shows how weak his argument is.”
No, here I disagree. BC’s argument is in that sense a consistent purist libertarian argument about freedom.
What his argument misses is that good culture (norms and institutions…) matters, and that fully open borders in conjunction with the reality of a generous welfare state risks with high probability destroying good cultures.
And this applies to Israel as well?
Regarding the “Immigration Road Map” (in the cartoon). A shorter and more libertarian version seems possible:
Step 1. In order to stop the negative externalities on the current population (by giving “public property” access to everyone in the world) privatise everything among the current population.
Step 2. Open borders: i.e., no limit on who can invite anyone onto their private property.
https://jclester.substack.com/p/immigration-and-libertarianism?utm_source=publication-search
“And this applies to Israel as well?”
What an absolutely *brilliant* response! I would LOVE to hear Bryan respond on *why* this one IS different (since Bryan is not insane, he will clearly agree that it is)…
The US is now a bankrupt welfare / warfare state blessed with regulatory quagmire present at all levels of government, essentially a green theocracy, a swelling public sector, an education system feeding a guild socialism of regulated professions and trades where cultural Marxism is rampant and you appear to be criticizing Friedman's priorities of policies by singling out open borders. Open borders were likely not particularly high on his list for good reason.
I think Garett Jones correctly points out the asymmetry between the movement of goods and movement of people.
This is what I was going to comment on as well - there's a verbal sleight of hand happening where the differences between humans and goods are ignored. Someone gets paid for goods in a voluntary transaction. I guess coyotes get paid to help people to covertly cross the border, but that is very much not receiving a shipment of steel for the dollars a business sent to China.
No, while I disagree with BC on this, it is not a verbal sleight of hand he is using. There is indeed a large economic cost to preventing a lot more immigration. Most - but by no means all - of it is borne by those not allowed to immigrate. On that point, BC is 100% correct.
Where he’s wrong is in the large not-directly-measurable (especially in the short run) costs of the high probability risk to culture (norms and institutions) to a country that allows unlimited migration, especially when done in the context of a generous welfare state (and especially where children born in the country automatically become citizens even if their parents are not).
"Undeniably, some people take advantage of the welfare state. But at least in the U.S., a supermajority of immigrants still prefer to work."
But the marginal increase in payroll tax revenues associated with working are not sufficient to pay for the marginal increase in the present value of future entitlement benefits associated with working. Each person added to the population of future beneficiaries, whether by immigration or by birth, only increases the staggering and unsustainable burden of unfunded liabilities (which is already a large multiple of the funded federal debt) and debt service costs. The only decision remaining open to politicians is whether they intend to honestly repudiate their unsustainable entitlement promises or to hyperinflate the dollar in a vain attempt to evade repudiation for a short while.
Even worse, state promises of future economic security have deterred workers (and everyone else) from saving over the past six decades, while the excess of payroll tax revenues over current trust fund expenditures generated in prior decades were squandered on financing greater government spending instead of funding productive investments. The increase of transfers as a percent of GDP has come almost entirely at the expense of the share of GDP devoted to net investment, which in turn means that capital goods formation was curtailed, the rate of real GDP growth has stagnated, and people who earn their incomes from complementary factors of production (especially labor) have seen their real incomes decline.
The correct retort to Friedman and to contemporary anti-immigration populists is that the deindustrialization of America and the decline of the middle class is the fault of Social Security, Medicare, and their financing via fiat money creation supporting debt monetization, not the fault of immigrants or of bad trade deals with China. Likewise, the growing inability of Western nations to assimilate immigrants is largely caused by welfare statism and by laws against private discrimination, which disincentivizes native-born and immigrants alike to voluntarily adjust their language and cultural norms to facilitate greater cooperation with one another.
1) In most welfare states, fertility rates among the poor are pretty low, usually right around replacement. If they were having 10 kids the narrative might well be different. There is hand wringing in Israel over the ultra orthodox, and Palestinian birthrates obviously have impacted the prospects of integrating them.
2) It's just plain easier to exclude immigrants then to police peoples fertility.
3) Willingness to work is meaningless. Productive work makes people rich, not work. Labor participation rates are high in poor countries.
4) Friedmen is correct that we can't have a Jim Crow slave caste in this country. And I know what you know this too Bryan! It's one thing to call for a slave caste on your blog. It's another to go on CNN or run for office and say "yes, we need a rightless underclass of brown worker units." You know it wouldn't fly.
Guest workers are not slaves. They were not kidnapped and brought here, they came over voluntarily. America already had a closer analogy near its founding: indentured servants.
Indentured Servitude is illegal and outlawed by the constitution.
>Still, “I believe in free trade, but not unless other countries embrace free trade, too” structurally parallels, “I believe in open borders, but not unless we abolish the welfare state, too.”
Pure wordcellery; the payoff matrices are different
Not just that, one of them is about other countries' policies, while the latter is purely about two different domestic policies.
https://youtu.be/w0AhLRZinS4?si=wLKVZ8ct2WO2Kr93
https://youtu.be/zx0hSxQmT64?si=lg5CGLS6UqI0NKlu
https://youtu.be/sEe-RZIni9M?si=Z49nl_1pxPrOARiU
https://youtu.be/m8-ifMOLVik?si=Bz4AzjionlwrhJYu
https://youtu.be/RVXtpweifSU?si=UKye3wxXPr9o_0dW
Friedman's underlying point that you can't have low cost immigration (for the immigrant) and generous welfare is completely valid -- it's just that immigration already has very large costs that aren't imposed by the government.
I can imagine a time in the future where digital life (VR etc) is available even to the global poor to such a degree it renders the costs of moving trivial (don't lose friends, no language or cultural barriers etc) at which point it might become true that you couldn't combine generous welfare with relatively easy immigration. However that's also a world in which nation states themselves start to make much less sense.
“…that's also a world in which nation states themselves start to make much less sense.”
Uh, no, digital life being available to the global poor at very low cost doesn’t make nation states cease to make sense, when given human nature there will continue to be thugs and demagogues (some based on religion, some not), who seek to plunder the wealth of others and/or force them to live under their boot.
Maybe the welfare state isn't a barrier to more immigration. But wouldn't you need to solve the issues you raise in Build Baby Build at least simultaneously, if not before, open borders?
Given that the tax burden is overwhelmingly for the native-born elderly, perhaps an even better analogy than freedom of reproduction is freedom of retirement.
Draconian restrictions on the right to have children are not necessary because of how easy it is to use the availability of birth control and persuasion to limit births. Most people want sex, not children.