Bryan, your open borders stance is probably the most reckless and evil belief you have, and nothing else is a close second. It's easily the most evil mainstream idea I can think of today.
Your assertion that Borjas remains unaware or willfully ignorant of the political and cultural effects of immigration is unconvincing.
I think it's obvious at this point that mass immigration of low IQ third worlders tends to make the first world more like the third world. If you ever succeeded in your vision of Open Borders, it would per Borjas calculation destroy rather than create trillions of dollars in value, as the stability and productivity of the first world collapsed to third world levels. In fact it might well be worse than that, as even third world productivity levels rely intensely on being able to leach off the first worlds productivity and technological progress.
What is most ironic of all is that the real problem with the third world is the genetics of third worlders. Per Hive Mind, the IQ of those around you matters more than your own. If genetic engineering ever fixes the third worlds IQ problem, they can just stay in place and get rich. The most likely place to invent such genetic engineering is the first world. Probably the most likely thing to destroy the first worlds advancement towards that outcome is flooding it with so many third worlders that its society collapses before it gets there.
---
I would view the "productivity gain" of a third worlders moving to the first world as "capital consumption". Imagine a car with a full gas tank. Somebody is walking along the sidewalk and hijacks the car. They are now getting to their destination faster, but eventually the car runs out of gas. They leave it on the side of the road to rot. They were never any faster, they just used up someone else's capital, capital they failed to build or maintain. After all, if they were capable of building a maintaining capital, they would already have it in their host country.
Bryan is 100% correct. We need to show this by having a country, say a small 1st world country bordering 3rd world countries, implement open borders and show the world by thriving example how great open borders are. I'm thinking of course of Israel. Open borders for Israel must be the rallying cry of all immigration reformers. Imagine, millions of arabs and sub-saharan African migrating to 1st world high gdp per capita Israel! Think of the comparative advantage gains that would accrue! the food ! teh benefits from diversity! Not only to the migrants, coming from impoverished 3rd world hell holes, but to the native Israelis as well!
The better point regarding Israel, is that Israel has done spectacularly well economically+demographically while enhancing their ethno-nationalist identity rather than undermining it. Caplan argues that dissolving and undermining the ethnic identities of Europe and the US leads to great economic growth. Israel is a counter point to that.
Magus, your comment sounds aimed at poking fun at the hypocrisy of those who promote Jewish identity + ethno nation state, while disparaging the same for other groups. That hypocrisy is real among prominent American pundits; Commentary and parts of NYT come to mind. But here, Caplan is fully on board with open borders for Israel and undermining Jewish identity, so he's not hypocritical on this at all.
I think there's a reasonable middle ground between the "we need to let everyone in" and "immigration is only beneficial to immigrants" positions. I think immigration of well-behaved, skilled, culturally compatible people is good, while immigration of hostile criminals is bad. I think this is pretty common sense.
How do you know that immigrants from a country with low IQ are representative of their populations? Emigration or rather the choice to emigrate may cause a selection effect. We know that as a population, immigrants to the US, are the longest lived people on the planet. Male immigrants to the US live longer than Swiss Males (Swiss (male and female) 83.7 years) and female immigrants to the US live longer than Japanese females (Japan (male and female) 84.4years) while the American life expectancy has plateaued at 78.8. This would suggest that as a group they have a very strong genetic fitness and likely make lifestyle decisions that ensure their survival while the America population they live amongst has stopped. Longevity correlates with intelligence. For example, a person with an IQ of 115 was 21% more likely to be alive at age 76 than a person with an IQ of 100 (the average for the general population).
To update your analogy what it is actually like is that in America everyone is given a car - immigrants take better care of their car, drive them more safely, and with greater efficiency than the average American. America and the average American would be better served to have more of them on the road in order to make it relatively safer.
Because we have statistics on how immigrants are performing and there is no indication there has been a positive selection effect from low IQ countries. At least amongst those from the mass group in question (Latin America for the USA, Africa/Middle East for Europe).
"mass immigration of low IQ third worlders tends to make the first world more like the third world". What a centrally planned, snobbish, elitist point of view. What do you think who built USA from 1606 to 1990s if not them?! What, only intellectuals and/or engineers are worthy of building The Great Nation? That's like thinking that people who immigrate from socialist countries to US will always vote Democrats, welfare and Big State. Nothing is further from truth. It's time you come down off your high horse and admit you are wrong. The history and the facts are against you anyway.
I hope you have fear of God when you write this stuff. You have wrote something extremely extremely horrible, uneducated, and cruel. I hope one day you realize that God exists and you realize that God sees people like you and what you are doing and what you are spreading.
I can't help but think that Bryan is unwilling to fully engage this problem in a not-superficial manner.
I would suggest to at least consider this as an instance of Pascal's wager. If you are right and we close the borders, we will be getting richer at a somewhat slower rate. If Emil is right and we open the borders, the western civilization will be over. Wanna bet on these stakes?
This is such an obvious and galling case of Pascal's mugging I'm shocked anyone could take this seriously. On the one hand you have tons of research and evidence that have been put together by Bryan and others to show that open borders is the equivalent of trillions of dollars on the sidewalk, not to mention the reduction in world poverty that it would entail. On the other hand you have a specious doomsaying assertion that has been made before almost every liberty-increasing reform. "Sure, if we let the serfs go free that might improve Russia's long run productivity, but if you listen to the reactionary nobility they are telling you it will spell the end of the country. What if there is a 1% chance they're right? Therefore, we should keep all the peasants in virtual slavery for eternity, QED."
What tons of research we have regarding situations when indigenous population has willingly let itself become a minority in its country? Has that ever happened in history?
I don't see how this would apply to America-- indigenous people were unwillingly made only a small fraction of the country and it's unlikely they could ever obtain a majority again.
If you want to answer that question across the broad sweep of history, it depends super heavily on what you mean by "country." The Roman Empire dramatically expanded citizenship to people who had not been considered Romans at several points in its history, starting with the social war, which as I understand it was broadly beneficial for Roman society. If you ignore citizenship and just count anyone under the rule of a country as included in that country, then most successful imperial projects would count, and have generally benefitted the metropole. You also have some weird experiments in European nationalism, such as the Hungarian revolution trying to create a Hungarian state centered on a Hungarian language which most people didn't speak; the breaking away of the territories which were mostly non-Hungarian is considered a national trauma. Overall the idea of indigeniety and nationhood is hard to define consistently over long periods of time which frustrates the question.
But the U.S. is a unique country if for no other reason than that we're bigger than any other economy ever has been. Ultimately any policy decision we make will involve extrapolation from limited historical evidence, but there is certainly a lot of evidence from the last 100-150 years of U.S. history that immigration benefits us. As we hopefully open the borders and expand the promise of liberty to more people, we will continue to be free to cut immigration back before we reach open borders--indeed, any path towards open borders will certainly include multiple periods of backlash-- but it would be silly to close the door on the basis of unsubstantiated doubt.
And regarding your last sentence- that's pretty much the opposite of truth. We shouldn't endeavor onto gigantic, sweeping policies with little to none evidence that they will work. It might turn out that it was indeed European immigration, not *any* immigration, that build the US. But by than it will be impossible to roll back.
For the first few centuries of the USA, various European groups were viewed with the exact same trepidation that you seem to have for non-European immigrants today. Italians, Germans, Irish, and other European ethnic groups were disparaged as stupid, lazy, wicked, etc. Whereas, say, English immigrants would be viewed with less suspicion. It seems you agree that in retrospect, those were unhelpful characterizations.
What you're doing seems like a recapitulation of the same error. You have a group that's smart and culturally similar to the US (For you, Europeans) and those immigrants are OK, but the less intelligent and culturally backward folks , (Africans, south Americans, south Asians, I'd assume) are undesirable.
Rather than concluding that it was Europeans that were the good guys the whole time, couldn't the lesson just as easily be drawn that it's mistake to paint ethnic groups as inherently desirable or undesirable?
The fact that Irish and Italians have integrated reasonably well (although Italians entertained USA with a century of mafia stories) does not imply that ANY immigrants would. The fact that differences in those sources of immigration turned out to be relatively inconsequential does not mean that any differences would be inconsequential.
Hume's problem of induction applies here, but a bit of scientific skepticism would be enough. If scientists proved that a glass of wine a day is healthy, it in no way implies a bottle of vodka is healthy too.
We KNOW there are differences between europeans and non europeans that are non existent within europeans. Some of them might be irrelevant, but national IQ is probably very relevant.
Regarding your last paragraph: consider following facts:
- countries that were targets of European immigration have done great (USA, Canada, NZ, Australia, Argentina)
- Europe that sourced those migrants have done great itself
-countries that have less European admixture (Latin america) are not that great
-foundational black "immigrants" have not been doing that great
- countries that sourced those black "immigrants" are doing poorly
Oh, we engage in sweeping policies that we have no idea if they will work or not all of the time. That's most of what this country does. I think immigration is the exception in that we have a lot of evidence that it makes America better. And of course if anything our immigration literature is overfocused on immigration from Mexico or Cuba and not focused as much on older, more data-sparse migrations like the arrival of various European groups. Although of course if you went back in time, people would argue that the migration of Catholics to the U.S. represented a distinct threat unlike earlier episodes of immigration, given that Catholics were coming in from poor countries with a different way of life and were associated with organized crime and machine politics.
I am European and advocating for closed border here more than in Americas. But the US "native" white population would certainly have done better to close the borders too, just as amerindians would have, if they had the power.
Your examples are totally moot. Romans and other italics were genetically and culturally pretty much the same people, extending citizenship has had pretty much no impact on the composition of the people of peninsula. All empires, including Roman, has had some immigration into large cities, but not the country, and those immigrants would have left pretty much no trace behind them as cities are population sinks. Still the extent of this immigration was incomparably smaller than immigration into Europe today.
What exactly is the Hungarian argument trying to do for you?I Did Slovaks invite huge numbers of Magyars into their lands? Did Hungarians become majority? Do you think Slovaks are looking positively on this part of their history?
I invite you to think again about one instance when a population residing in an area (so that you don't get distracted by irrelevant ideas of nationhood and citizenship) allowed voluntarily other peoples to settle in the area and it went well for them.
The Roman example is perhaps becoming distracting, but no one at the time thought that Romans and other italians were culturally identical, hence the whole war fought over extending citizenship. But there were also later expansions of citizenships to include people in Gaul, Germania, Iberia, etc., etc. The Hungarian example shows that Hungarian nationalists preferred to pull together many different ethnic groups into their nation instead of only keep the Hungarian-speaking parts, because they recognized that ethnic homogeny was not the most important goal for them when establishing a homogenous nation. Also, I would point out that if immigration to cities is fine, we could just do that in the U.S., and already most immigrants gravitate towards cities.
The examples I would point you to for allowing settlement are colonial endeavors such as the US, Canada, Australia, NZ, where influxes of people led clearly to increases in prosperity. Benjamin Franklin warned about the "swarthy" German immigrants who would go on to settle the Midwest for us, and later generations of immigrants swelled right before the U.S. economy massively expanded. Purely British-descended Americans are almost certainly a vanishingly small minority, given how much white people in the U.S. are ethnically mixed, and we are the largest economy in the world and its largest engine of mass culture, center of world politics, etc.
It's the deal that amerindians have gotten from the European colonization that you should be looking into. Europe was relatively homogenous, I don't know why you keep thinking about differences in English vs German incomers, as is that helps you understand all of the facets of immigration.
So I asked you to provide a historical example of a comparable phenomena to today's mass immigration, and you are just unable to do so. I'm not sure you even want to continue the Hungarian and Roman examples, seems like you realized yourself they are not applicable here? Regarding cities, historically about 20% of population lived in urban settings, so it was relatively easy for the rural population to replenish them with no long term effect. Historically immigration to cities was inconsequential regarding local populations. That is of course different today with massive urbanization. Plus the sheer volume is so large that immigrants are seeping even into the smallest towns in Europe.
Everyone obsesses over the economics of immigration, but this debate is really about much more than economics.
In a recent post, Emil writes:
*****
I think ethnic groups should be governed by those they want to. I support decentralization and regionalism, and thus also separatist movements. For me it is not about whether these movements are left-wing or conservative. I am equally happy to support Catalan independence, Basque independence, North Italian independence, Scottish independence, and so on.
In this sense, I am in favor of universal ethno-nationalism, in the same way that Dalai Lama described it. The Lama sees it well because China is currently taking over his homeland by settling it with Chinese people (I support Tibetan separatism, of course). This kind of settler slow-invasion strategy is of course well known in history (e.g. German version).
*****
Bryan has a very different view. He lays it out most bluntly here:
If you’re afraid of every group, though, shouldn’t you support whatever group has the minimum chance of doing terrible things once it’s firmly in charge? Not at all. There’s another path: Try to prevent any group from being firmly in charge. In the long-run, the best way to do this is to make every group a small minority – to split society into such small pieces that everyone abandons hope of running society and refocuses their energy on building beautiful Bubbles....
When people lament the political externalities of open borders, they’re usually picturing an influx of a group with a bad track record of being in charge. In a sense, these critics understate their case; numerical superiority can turn even the nicest groups into a mortal danger. But critics also overlook the open borders remedy: Diaspora dynamics notwithstanding, welcoming everyone is a great way to turn everyone into a minority. And while that hardly guarantees safety, it’s less menacing than the status quo.
*****
So, to the commenters pointing out that Bryan's Open Borders would hurt social cohesion: Yes! That's the point!! Bryan WANTS you to have less in common with your neighbors than you do now.
Now, living within a relatively cohesive culture, whether of a tribe, region, or nation, has been the modal situation for humans since time immemorial. There are other social strategies, though. One way to think of Caplan's immigration advocacy is as a demand that majorities around the world reorganize themselves for the psychological and financial benefit of middleman minorities.
So, you basically aren't allowed to argue for ethno-nationalism. More specifically, you aren't allowed to argue for white ethno-nationalism or identity concerns, however black nationalism, latino nationalism, LBGTQ nationalism are promoted. Eric Kaufmann famously calls this Asymmetrical Multiculturalism. Most normal white people don't like this, express the concerns about immigration that they are allowed to express which are economic, crime, terrorism, etc. These are generally less valid, but those are what people are allowed to say. And white people basically aren't allowed to express their actual concerns.
Yeah, I agree with your summary of the prevailing taboos. These taboos explain why opponents of mass immigration engage in endless, hairsplitting debates about the wages of high school dropouts and so on. (Not saying that these issues don't matter, only that they're not what actually motivates either side of the debate.)
I'd never seen that particular Caplan piece; as you say, it's very direct. Caplan is better than most of the immigration advocates for the simple reason that he's more honest about what he really thinks. For most of the others, we have only words caught on video that they regret and candid tweets that they hastily delete.
Let's consider a specific example. Consider a hair stylist from Honduras, who moves to Dallas. She made $3/hour in Honduras, and now she makes $12/hour in Dallas. By your argument, her productivity should have grown around 4-fold. How exactly does that work? Can she now serve 4 times as many customers as before? Do the tools of the trade in Dallas are so much more effective than the ones in Honduras? The answer is, of course, no, she isn't any more productive than native-born American stylist (in fact, most likely less, as a large number of customers will prefer hair stylist who speaks fluent, conversational English, and shares enough of a culture to create a conversation). This is simply Baumol's cost disease amplifying hair stylist wages in America, nothing to do with actual productivity as measured by actual output.
Since your first and strongest economic argument for immigration rests on the effects Baumol's cost disease, which is that highly productive sectors of economy pull the wages of the less productive sectors up without any changes in actual productivity in the low productivity sector, wouldn't increasing the low-productivity sectors in size (as overwhelming majority of immigration in US is ending up in low productivity sectors, and H1Bs constituting only a small fraction) result in "washing out" the effects of Baumol's cost disease? Baumol only lifts the low productivity sectors because the high productivity sectors are relatively large, and provide plenty of opportunity for low productivity sector workers. If high productivity sectors become a smaller fraction of the entire economy, won't it result in slashing wages in low productivity sectors across the board?
Productivity does not measure outputs alone, it measures the value of the outputs. When they move to America, they are doing to same thing to people who have value it more.
You are, of course, right about this argument. But I still struggle with "open borders" in a way that, perhaps, you touch upon in your scalability comments.
Most libertarians believe, and I think that you fall into this camp also, that "culture" and "institutions" are extremely important for economic and social progress. Most libertarians also believe that, although not immutable, the impact of culture on an individual is fairly strong and durable. Putting these things together, I don't see how you can be in favor of "open borders" where the potential influx of people from radically different and potentially inimical cultures is very possible. This isn't the 19th century when the barriers to entry were large; entry into an "open borders" country is just the price of an airline ticket these days.
I think that these libertarian beliefs are completely compatible with a robust level of immigration, certainly higher and easier than the system we currently have, but only within the limits of the "melting pot" to absorb and inculcate. They are not compatible with "open borders" which could easily overrun these limits. I think that we are currently seeing precisely this effect in places like Scandinavia and Germany, where the sudden influx of immigrants is producing social issues and ghettoization. These countries are fundamentally less good at including immigrants so this is happening at a lower level of immigration than it would happen in the USA, but even the USA's capacity is not unlimited and it is likely much lower than the results that "open borders" would produce.
There is another argument for caution in this respect, which is namely that the results of an "open borders" policy are irreversible, assuming that no one is going to approve mass deportations if it proves to be excessive. So, although the limits of the USA to absorb immigrants succcessfully is unknowable, the irreversibility of the process argues for stepwise progress and not a radical change to "open borders."
Well put. As a card carrying libertarian (and melting-pot loving New Yorker) , I used to be pro-open borders. Then I saw what happened in some cities in Europe that have been completely changed by immigration. I think a root issue is that there are some norms that are fragile. There may be a norm in a town that quiet time starts at 10PM, and everyone in that town benefits since they all get a good night's sleep. It takes a very small absolute number of people making loud noise all night to hit a tipping point where the norm is lost forever, and then everyone is worse off. One could suggest that the norms should instead be made into laws, but in practice this is not practical for many reasons - one of which being that the culture of a place has many subtle norms that would be very hard to codify and then enforce. Again, I hate that this is true - but it is true in places that I have actually been, and the people who lived in those places are now understandably sad (and tired).
Have northern whites of The White Flight fame benefited from The Great northern migration? Just look at the size of the white population of New York, observe the revealed preferences. Their haircuts and car washes might have been cheaper. Until they found it unbearable to live in the city anymore.
The argument is off. I don't know if ultimately open borders impoverish or enrich a country, but the welfare enhancing mechanism described in this essay doesn't work for the simple reason that overall productivity is unaffected; immigrants simply converge to the prevailing level of factor productivity of the receiving nation and add to its overall stock of workers (unless we are talking about Indian or Korean PhDs or whatever, but that has clearly never been the focus of this debate, especially in countries like Germany or Italy who overwhelmingly receive low human capital immigrants).
It is tautological to say that they add to GDP (indeed, they could not work a single day of their lives and they would still enhance GDP because of increased welfare state spending), so that should be kept strictly separate from questions of incidence.
What can be argued is that open borders are welfare maximizing for the planet as a whole because they increase the productivity of the average human being, but people live in countries, not in the United States of Earth. Nevermind the fact that Emil freely acknowledges that immigrants see massive benefits (eg, entirely consistent with many people winning massively).
It remains an open question if the native population of a country simply increasing the size of its labour pool and observe, I repeat, no increase in its productivity, will benefit.
Also, the native population will have a smaller stake in the country, and will have to deal with the increase in population density and less natural resources per capita.
>The people interested in trading with you immigrating from countries where they have low productivity to countries where they have high productivity and are at least as interested in trading with you gets you more gains from trade and therefore benefits you in expectation.
If there is little trade in the first place, it is entirely possible that the gains you are describing don't really outweight the known issues of immigration. In the European context it is basically beyond dispute that immigrants commit more crime and are a fiscal drag, for example.
Put another way: if the entire population of Afghanistan moved to Germany tomorrow, the effect would be the exact same as if the German population simply, organically, grew by 40 million people (assuming Afghans converge to German productivity and pro-social behaviours instantly; this is a big assumption). Why would it be the same? Because Germany has insignificant trade flows with Afghanistan. The "gains from trade" you describe don't really apply, do they?
Now, does Germany producing an extra 40 million human beings in one night enhance the welfare of the average German? Maybe. There's economies of scale, maybe some more innovation because young people like to tinker. But it's a maybe. It is possible that Germans actually rather enjoy being a country of X million people for whatever reasons.
The really intellectually thorny question is whether these massive per-migrant gains are scalable. Can we reasonably hope to move billions of people to the First World without killing the goose that lays the golden eggs?
If the move happened overnight, then even I would say, “No.” Over the course of a century, however, I say, “No problem.”
/Quote
Bryan, this seems like a tacit retreat from your longstanding radical open borders position. Short of migration controls, what's the mechanism by which this change will be stretched out over a hundred years?
We've entered a world that's massively different than it was in 1980, let alone 1840. Even poor third-world people now have phones with internet connections and WhatsApp accounts. It's much easier for them to see what rich countries are like and much easier to figure out how to get into them. Transcontinental airplane and ship travel are within the financial reach of vastly larger numbers of people than they once were. Open borders in 2022 or 2030 would look more like a tsunami than like nineteenth-century Europeans coming to America on sailing ships.
I think you are strawmanning the position against immigration a bit. Not that there aren't people who believe any given thing on immigration, mind, but I don't think people, for the most part, are saying that incomes going up for one section of the country don't benefit others in some kind of weird absolute sense. (Though, I definitely think if you articulated this argument people would sneer at you for believing in 'trickle down' economics.)
Imagine John, an Indian worker who lives in India. He gets paid an amount X. He moves to America, now he gets paid 10x what he used to. Bosses be weird, but that's how it works.
You are saying, 'this is good for America, John is making 10x what he used to'. You are representing your opponents as saying 'this is nothing for America, John keeps those gains to himself'. Some may say that, but the thing to draw attention to here is that America is not multiplying the wages of a worker it had previously by 10x, it is gaining a new worker who works for this price. That might be good, it might be bad, but it is fundamentally different than the uncomplicated 'guy got a raise' case. Is having a new worker/inhabitant good overall? Well, depends on the person, yeah?
When you talk about John's income rising as 'gains', it's a bit deceptive. Previously an American boss paid 10% the salary overseas, kept the 90%. Now 100% is paid to an Indian worker living in America. Is it better, in the kind of trickling sideways incidence you are talking about, to be in the one state or the other? Certainly it is better for John, but it isn't immediately obvious that the rest of the economy benefits more from a worker with that money vs a company with 90% of that money. Again, it is going to depend on the worker.
Beyond that, there is the case of a worker who wasn't previously employed by an American country. He shows up, gets a job. Is that good or bad? Well, it might be either, but however we figure that out, it won't be measured that his salary has risen 90%. America has another laborer. Maybe that's good, maybe it isn't, but what is not the case is that the labor market has gotten a 10x raise.
Lastly, please forgive us our skepticism. You folks on the left are open about the fact that you are consequentialists, who will lie for what you consider good causes. That is totally reasonable from your POV. If you are saving the earth, what is your honor as a price? Imagine you told a few lies and got anti global warming stuff passed. Net gain, yeah? But from our perspective, you can see how we get into a 'once burned, twice shy' when faced with a conversational partner who lies shamelessly to take power, and sleeps easily that night. You get one freebie per generation, as each new set of right wingers learn this lesson. You are currently still in the 'burned' phase from legalizing weed, got to wait a decade or so for us to fall for your smooth talk again.
Bryan is a single issue activist. That single issue is open borders. Caplan might agree with the right on more issues, like free market health care, deregulation, school choice, or shrinking + weakening government bureaucracies, etc, but as a pundit and activist, he rounds the importance of other issues to about zero, and he's effectively been a left-wing pundit + activist.
Talking about immigration as a rise in wages misses the point. Prices are just a reflection of underlying economic realities. An immigrant to the U.S. becomes more productive in the U.S. because they work under more fair/predictable/pro-market laws, because they work for more valuable enterprises, because they are able to start businesses serving wealthier consumers, etc. The whole idea is that we get to plug immigrant human capital into a giant economic machine that is fantastically good at using human capital (versus the baseline of other countries and world history).
Not really making the argument, but as I understand it there is some suggestive correlation emerging between widespread/chronic use of marijuana concomitant with legalization, and significant increases in mental health disorders: anxieties, depressions, paranoia, mania and psychoses, schizophrenia, anhedonia, and also losses in fertility. Can’t speak to whether research will bear this out longitudinally and rigorously, but my anecdotal experience is that all my friends and acquaintances who became habitual users struggle with serious anxiety, and one of my friends, who had manageable mental health issues already, spiraled out into a bizarre years-long bipolar (mania and depression alternately, but not really apparently bipolar as-she-is-known in texts) episode that only reverted when he was forced clean for a period. His doctors chalked it up to an apparent bizarre effect of truly *staggering* amounts of marijuana use.
You may or may not be insane; that's not a term I bandy about. I don't know either of you. But I am an economist and understand how the labour market works. Immigration does benefit the migrant tremendously, but that is not the full extent of the impact. Even the full macroeconomic and microeconomic impacts do not tell the whole story.
We cannot go back in time and see how a different immigration policy would have affected the US. You also ignore the fact that the 19th century is WILDLY different from our current country in every conceivable way. Non-existent welfare state, no multiculturalism or diversity, massive pressure to assimilate, different education levels, cultural mores, values and most importantly the US needed warm bodies to industrialize. That phase is over and with it, the need for more than de minims unskilled immigration.
In the 19th century naturalization was limited to whites and as soon as the US began seeing large scale Chinese immigration Chinese immigration was banned.
I very much appreciate that Caplan is openly willing address a critic like Emil without resorting to personal attacks.
But I wish Caplan would have also considered the potential damage to American culture and social capital (and their long term economic effects) that can happen when immigrants bring with them too much of the behaviors that have made their native countries poor and illiberal.
Not only is it poorly argued, but there is no sense of risk/reward.
If it's really that easy to make people in the third world productive, then you would think they would have done it themselves by now. For Open Borders to make sense as a risk to take, you have to simultaneously believe that billions of people would be radically more productive in America and simultaneously believe that all of these billions of people in all their individual countries around the world will NEVER get their act together and create these magic "good institutions" no matter how long they have to do or or how many Bryan Caplan books they read.
After all, the easiest and low risk option is to just fix the countries these people live in already. Bryan almost seems to believe that's an impossible task, and that moving billions of people without impacting first world institutions would be easier.
The "easy" thing is moving to a place where all the stuff around you (institutions, technology etc) are very much better than where you come from. Getting the Haitian government to US level and Haitian machinery, internet connections, computers etc to US levels is very hard, or rather completely impossible for any Haitian worker, or large group of Haitian workers for that matter. Moving to US is a lot easier. Fixing a broken country is probably not as easy as you seem to believe.
And yet we fixed Japan and Germany quite quickly. It's amazing how quickly you can fix countries with good human capital, and amazing how impossible it is to fix countries with bad human capital.
I'm like Emil. massive admirer of all your work, but consider your immigration views to miss a lot.
1. do you disagree with the "China effect" recent argument? where a huge number of people went unemployed and lost their quality of life immediately due to imports from China?
displacement can be very real.
2. you assume that immigrants will not have negative effects on the culture (social capital) despite sociologists finding that areas with more immigrants have lower social trust etc.
3. you assume that immigrants will not participate enough in elections to turn the US into a Turkey, Russia, it Pakistan. the data of current immigrants election tendencies can't be used to extrapolate about when lots of immigrants will arrive.
4. it's very difficult for you to consider things from a purely self interested current US citizen. you agree to talk about it with gritted teeth, while for you liberty and the interests of migrants are still on top. very hard to steelman the opposite argument when you yourself feel so alienated by it
Also don't we think that we should have not set on a course where many countries will have their native populations outnumbered by immigrants within our lifetimes (thus making it almost impossible to revert) until after we finish this debate, that has barely even began?
I would amend Emil's Twitter statement to include "employers" as the other group that benefits from low-skill immigration disproportionately.
The costs of course are distributed across a vast number of people in the form of tax burdens generated by the presence of that migrant worker and (typically) their family. They emerge in the form of crowding in public schools, more traffic, and higher prices for rivalrous goods like Healthcare and housing.
But I would take issue with the notion that immigrants magically become "more productive" because they're on our magic dirt. They may _earn_ more, but that doesn't make them more productive in an absolute sense. A cab driver in Port Au Prince moving to NY is still a cab driver. Prices are just higher in NY.
Being in America is much nicer than being in Haiti. That's because Americans built America and there's something special about the set of rules we used to construct this country and its institutions. To arbitrarily move every Haitian to America would simply recreate Haiti here in America. Our dirt isn't so magical that it could overwrite the negative cultural memes that created Haiti simply by placing a couple million Hatians here.
The principle that “increased productivity enriches not just producers, but consumers” is an instance of what might be called “trickle sideways economics.”
Bryan, your open borders stance is probably the most reckless and evil belief you have, and nothing else is a close second. It's easily the most evil mainstream idea I can think of today.
This has already been covered before.
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2014/07/open_borders_an_3.html
Your assertion that Borjas remains unaware or willfully ignorant of the political and cultural effects of immigration is unconvincing.
I think it's obvious at this point that mass immigration of low IQ third worlders tends to make the first world more like the third world. If you ever succeeded in your vision of Open Borders, it would per Borjas calculation destroy rather than create trillions of dollars in value, as the stability and productivity of the first world collapsed to third world levels. In fact it might well be worse than that, as even third world productivity levels rely intensely on being able to leach off the first worlds productivity and technological progress.
What is most ironic of all is that the real problem with the third world is the genetics of third worlders. Per Hive Mind, the IQ of those around you matters more than your own. If genetic engineering ever fixes the third worlds IQ problem, they can just stay in place and get rich. The most likely place to invent such genetic engineering is the first world. Probably the most likely thing to destroy the first worlds advancement towards that outcome is flooding it with so many third worlders that its society collapses before it gets there.
---
I would view the "productivity gain" of a third worlders moving to the first world as "capital consumption". Imagine a car with a full gas tank. Somebody is walking along the sidewalk and hijacks the car. They are now getting to their destination faster, but eventually the car runs out of gas. They leave it on the side of the road to rot. They were never any faster, they just used up someone else's capital, capital they failed to build or maintain. After all, if they were capable of building a maintaining capital, they would already have it in their host country.
Bryan is 100% correct. We need to show this by having a country, say a small 1st world country bordering 3rd world countries, implement open borders and show the world by thriving example how great open borders are. I'm thinking of course of Israel. Open borders for Israel must be the rallying cry of all immigration reformers. Imagine, millions of arabs and sub-saharan African migrating to 1st world high gdp per capita Israel! Think of the comparative advantage gains that would accrue! the food ! teh benefits from diversity! Not only to the migrants, coming from impoverished 3rd world hell holes, but to the native Israelis as well!
#openbordersforIsrael
The better point regarding Israel, is that Israel has done spectacularly well economically+demographically while enhancing their ethno-nationalist identity rather than undermining it. Caplan argues that dissolving and undermining the ethnic identities of Europe and the US leads to great economic growth. Israel is a counter point to that.
Magus, your comment sounds aimed at poking fun at the hypocrisy of those who promote Jewish identity + ethno nation state, while disparaging the same for other groups. That hypocrisy is real among prominent American pundits; Commentary and parts of NYT come to mind. But here, Caplan is fully on board with open borders for Israel and undermining Jewish identity, so he's not hypocritical on this at all.
I think there's a reasonable middle ground between the "we need to let everyone in" and "immigration is only beneficial to immigrants" positions. I think immigration of well-behaved, skilled, culturally compatible people is good, while immigration of hostile criminals is bad. I think this is pretty common sense.
Sure, but that isn't "Open Borders". It's Australia or Singapore or whatever.
How do you know that immigrants from a country with low IQ are representative of their populations? Emigration or rather the choice to emigrate may cause a selection effect. We know that as a population, immigrants to the US, are the longest lived people on the planet. Male immigrants to the US live longer than Swiss Males (Swiss (male and female) 83.7 years) and female immigrants to the US live longer than Japanese females (Japan (male and female) 84.4years) while the American life expectancy has plateaued at 78.8. This would suggest that as a group they have a very strong genetic fitness and likely make lifestyle decisions that ensure their survival while the America population they live amongst has stopped. Longevity correlates with intelligence. For example, a person with an IQ of 115 was 21% more likely to be alive at age 76 than a person with an IQ of 100 (the average for the general population).
To update your analogy what it is actually like is that in America everyone is given a car - immigrants take better care of their car, drive them more safely, and with greater efficiency than the average American. America and the average American would be better served to have more of them on the road in order to make it relatively safer.
Because we have statistics on how immigrants are performing and there is no indication there has been a positive selection effect from low IQ countries. At least amongst those from the mass group in question (Latin America for the USA, Africa/Middle East for Europe).
"mass immigration of low IQ third worlders tends to make the first world more like the third world". What a centrally planned, snobbish, elitist point of view. What do you think who built USA from 1606 to 1990s if not them?! What, only intellectuals and/or engineers are worthy of building The Great Nation? That's like thinking that people who immigrate from socialist countries to US will always vote Democrats, welfare and Big State. Nothing is further from truth. It's time you come down off your high horse and admit you are wrong. The history and the facts are against you anyway.
The USA was mostly built by European immigrants. Average IQ 100.
By definition, yes. If you mean to say cognitively equal to today - what are you basing this on?
They had higher genetic potential than the current Hispanic immigrants.
I hope you have fear of God when you write this stuff. You have wrote something extremely extremely horrible, uneducated, and cruel. I hope one day you realize that God exists and you realize that God sees people like you and what you are doing and what you are spreading.
I can't help but think that Bryan is unwilling to fully engage this problem in a not-superficial manner.
I would suggest to at least consider this as an instance of Pascal's wager. If you are right and we close the borders, we will be getting richer at a somewhat slower rate. If Emil is right and we open the borders, the western civilization will be over. Wanna bet on these stakes?
would be interesting with bets on the % chances. And also stuff like:
Will policy change as to not get stuck at giving all imigrants benefits? ( ie, the sweden problem)
and other second order effects
This is such an obvious and galling case of Pascal's mugging I'm shocked anyone could take this seriously. On the one hand you have tons of research and evidence that have been put together by Bryan and others to show that open borders is the equivalent of trillions of dollars on the sidewalk, not to mention the reduction in world poverty that it would entail. On the other hand you have a specious doomsaying assertion that has been made before almost every liberty-increasing reform. "Sure, if we let the serfs go free that might improve Russia's long run productivity, but if you listen to the reactionary nobility they are telling you it will spell the end of the country. What if there is a 1% chance they're right? Therefore, we should keep all the peasants in virtual slavery for eternity, QED."
What tons of research we have regarding situations when indigenous population has willingly let itself become a minority in its country? Has that ever happened in history?
I don't see how this would apply to America-- indigenous people were unwillingly made only a small fraction of the country and it's unlikely they could ever obtain a majority again.
If you want to answer that question across the broad sweep of history, it depends super heavily on what you mean by "country." The Roman Empire dramatically expanded citizenship to people who had not been considered Romans at several points in its history, starting with the social war, which as I understand it was broadly beneficial for Roman society. If you ignore citizenship and just count anyone under the rule of a country as included in that country, then most successful imperial projects would count, and have generally benefitted the metropole. You also have some weird experiments in European nationalism, such as the Hungarian revolution trying to create a Hungarian state centered on a Hungarian language which most people didn't speak; the breaking away of the territories which were mostly non-Hungarian is considered a national trauma. Overall the idea of indigeniety and nationhood is hard to define consistently over long periods of time which frustrates the question.
But the U.S. is a unique country if for no other reason than that we're bigger than any other economy ever has been. Ultimately any policy decision we make will involve extrapolation from limited historical evidence, but there is certainly a lot of evidence from the last 100-150 years of U.S. history that immigration benefits us. As we hopefully open the borders and expand the promise of liberty to more people, we will continue to be free to cut immigration back before we reach open borders--indeed, any path towards open borders will certainly include multiple periods of backlash-- but it would be silly to close the door on the basis of unsubstantiated doubt.
And regarding your last sentence- that's pretty much the opposite of truth. We shouldn't endeavor onto gigantic, sweeping policies with little to none evidence that they will work. It might turn out that it was indeed European immigration, not *any* immigration, that build the US. But by than it will be impossible to roll back.
For the first few centuries of the USA, various European groups were viewed with the exact same trepidation that you seem to have for non-European immigrants today. Italians, Germans, Irish, and other European ethnic groups were disparaged as stupid, lazy, wicked, etc. Whereas, say, English immigrants would be viewed with less suspicion. It seems you agree that in retrospect, those were unhelpful characterizations.
What you're doing seems like a recapitulation of the same error. You have a group that's smart and culturally similar to the US (For you, Europeans) and those immigrants are OK, but the less intelligent and culturally backward folks , (Africans, south Americans, south Asians, I'd assume) are undesirable.
Rather than concluding that it was Europeans that were the good guys the whole time, couldn't the lesson just as easily be drawn that it's mistake to paint ethnic groups as inherently desirable or undesirable?
The fact that Irish and Italians have integrated reasonably well (although Italians entertained USA with a century of mafia stories) does not imply that ANY immigrants would. The fact that differences in those sources of immigration turned out to be relatively inconsequential does not mean that any differences would be inconsequential.
Hume's problem of induction applies here, but a bit of scientific skepticism would be enough. If scientists proved that a glass of wine a day is healthy, it in no way implies a bottle of vodka is healthy too.
We KNOW there are differences between europeans and non europeans that are non existent within europeans. Some of them might be irrelevant, but national IQ is probably very relevant.
Regarding your last paragraph: consider following facts:
- countries that were targets of European immigration have done great (USA, Canada, NZ, Australia, Argentina)
- Europe that sourced those migrants have done great itself
-countries that have less European admixture (Latin america) are not that great
-foundational black "immigrants" have not been doing that great
- countries that sourced those black "immigrants" are doing poorly
Whats the constant and what's the variable here?
Oh, we engage in sweeping policies that we have no idea if they will work or not all of the time. That's most of what this country does. I think immigration is the exception in that we have a lot of evidence that it makes America better. And of course if anything our immigration literature is overfocused on immigration from Mexico or Cuba and not focused as much on older, more data-sparse migrations like the arrival of various European groups. Although of course if you went back in time, people would argue that the migration of Catholics to the U.S. represented a distinct threat unlike earlier episodes of immigration, given that Catholics were coming in from poor countries with a different way of life and were associated with organized crime and machine politics.
So I say it's idiotic and you say oh yeah we do that all the time. I hope you don't work in any kind of risk management
I am European and advocating for closed border here more than in Americas. But the US "native" white population would certainly have done better to close the borders too, just as amerindians would have, if they had the power.
Your examples are totally moot. Romans and other italics were genetically and culturally pretty much the same people, extending citizenship has had pretty much no impact on the composition of the people of peninsula. All empires, including Roman, has had some immigration into large cities, but not the country, and those immigrants would have left pretty much no trace behind them as cities are population sinks. Still the extent of this immigration was incomparably smaller than immigration into Europe today.
What exactly is the Hungarian argument trying to do for you?I Did Slovaks invite huge numbers of Magyars into their lands? Did Hungarians become majority? Do you think Slovaks are looking positively on this part of their history?
I invite you to think again about one instance when a population residing in an area (so that you don't get distracted by irrelevant ideas of nationhood and citizenship) allowed voluntarily other peoples to settle in the area and it went well for them.
The Roman example is perhaps becoming distracting, but no one at the time thought that Romans and other italians were culturally identical, hence the whole war fought over extending citizenship. But there were also later expansions of citizenships to include people in Gaul, Germania, Iberia, etc., etc. The Hungarian example shows that Hungarian nationalists preferred to pull together many different ethnic groups into their nation instead of only keep the Hungarian-speaking parts, because they recognized that ethnic homogeny was not the most important goal for them when establishing a homogenous nation. Also, I would point out that if immigration to cities is fine, we could just do that in the U.S., and already most immigrants gravitate towards cities.
The examples I would point you to for allowing settlement are colonial endeavors such as the US, Canada, Australia, NZ, where influxes of people led clearly to increases in prosperity. Benjamin Franklin warned about the "swarthy" German immigrants who would go on to settle the Midwest for us, and later generations of immigrants swelled right before the U.S. economy massively expanded. Purely British-descended Americans are almost certainly a vanishingly small minority, given how much white people in the U.S. are ethnically mixed, and we are the largest economy in the world and its largest engine of mass culture, center of world politics, etc.
It's the deal that amerindians have gotten from the European colonization that you should be looking into. Europe was relatively homogenous, I don't know why you keep thinking about differences in English vs German incomers, as is that helps you understand all of the facets of immigration.
So I asked you to provide a historical example of a comparable phenomena to today's mass immigration, and you are just unable to do so. I'm not sure you even want to continue the Hungarian and Roman examples, seems like you realized yourself they are not applicable here? Regarding cities, historically about 20% of population lived in urban settings, so it was relatively easy for the rural population to replenish them with no long term effect. Historically immigration to cities was inconsequential regarding local populations. That is of course different today with massive urbanization. Plus the sheer volume is so large that immigrants are seeping even into the smallest towns in Europe.
Everyone obsesses over the economics of immigration, but this debate is really about much more than economics.
In a recent post, Emil writes:
*****
I think ethnic groups should be governed by those they want to. I support decentralization and regionalism, and thus also separatist movements. For me it is not about whether these movements are left-wing or conservative. I am equally happy to support Catalan independence, Basque independence, North Italian independence, Scottish independence, and so on.
In this sense, I am in favor of universal ethno-nationalism, in the same way that Dalai Lama described it. The Lama sees it well because China is currently taking over his homeland by settling it with Chinese people (I support Tibetan separatism, of course). This kind of settler slow-invasion strategy is of course well known in history (e.g. German version).
*****
Bryan has a very different view. He lays it out most bluntly here:
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2015/10/they_scare_me.html
*****
If you’re afraid of every group, though, shouldn’t you support whatever group has the minimum chance of doing terrible things once it’s firmly in charge? Not at all. There’s another path: Try to prevent any group from being firmly in charge. In the long-run, the best way to do this is to make every group a small minority – to split society into such small pieces that everyone abandons hope of running society and refocuses their energy on building beautiful Bubbles....
When people lament the political externalities of open borders, they’re usually picturing an influx of a group with a bad track record of being in charge. In a sense, these critics understate their case; numerical superiority can turn even the nicest groups into a mortal danger. But critics also overlook the open borders remedy: Diaspora dynamics notwithstanding, welcoming everyone is a great way to turn everyone into a minority. And while that hardly guarantees safety, it’s less menacing than the status quo.
*****
So, to the commenters pointing out that Bryan's Open Borders would hurt social cohesion: Yes! That's the point!! Bryan WANTS you to have less in common with your neighbors than you do now.
Now, living within a relatively cohesive culture, whether of a tribe, region, or nation, has been the modal situation for humans since time immemorial. There are other social strategies, though. One way to think of Caplan's immigration advocacy is as a demand that majorities around the world reorganize themselves for the psychological and financial benefit of middleman minorities.
So, you basically aren't allowed to argue for ethno-nationalism. More specifically, you aren't allowed to argue for white ethno-nationalism or identity concerns, however black nationalism, latino nationalism, LBGTQ nationalism are promoted. Eric Kaufmann famously calls this Asymmetrical Multiculturalism. Most normal white people don't like this, express the concerns about immigration that they are allowed to express which are economic, crime, terrorism, etc. These are generally less valid, but those are what people are allowed to say. And white people basically aren't allowed to express their actual concerns.
Caplan argues against this more directly here: https://fee.org/articles/you-have-no-right-to-your-culture/
Or as the CATO open border advocate, Alex Nowrasteh, says, "We’re an economy with a country, not a country with an economy."
Yeah, I agree with your summary of the prevailing taboos. These taboos explain why opponents of mass immigration engage in endless, hairsplitting debates about the wages of high school dropouts and so on. (Not saying that these issues don't matter, only that they're not what actually motivates either side of the debate.)
I'd never seen that particular Caplan piece; as you say, it's very direct. Caplan is better than most of the immigration advocates for the simple reason that he's more honest about what he really thinks. For most of the others, we have only words caught on video that they regret and candid tweets that they hastily delete.
Let's consider a specific example. Consider a hair stylist from Honduras, who moves to Dallas. She made $3/hour in Honduras, and now she makes $12/hour in Dallas. By your argument, her productivity should have grown around 4-fold. How exactly does that work? Can she now serve 4 times as many customers as before? Do the tools of the trade in Dallas are so much more effective than the ones in Honduras? The answer is, of course, no, she isn't any more productive than native-born American stylist (in fact, most likely less, as a large number of customers will prefer hair stylist who speaks fluent, conversational English, and shares enough of a culture to create a conversation). This is simply Baumol's cost disease amplifying hair stylist wages in America, nothing to do with actual productivity as measured by actual output.
Since your first and strongest economic argument for immigration rests on the effects Baumol's cost disease, which is that highly productive sectors of economy pull the wages of the less productive sectors up without any changes in actual productivity in the low productivity sector, wouldn't increasing the low-productivity sectors in size (as overwhelming majority of immigration in US is ending up in low productivity sectors, and H1Bs constituting only a small fraction) result in "washing out" the effects of Baumol's cost disease? Baumol only lifts the low productivity sectors because the high productivity sectors are relatively large, and provide plenty of opportunity for low productivity sector workers. If high productivity sectors become a smaller fraction of the entire economy, won't it result in slashing wages in low productivity sectors across the board?
Productivity does not measure outputs alone, it measures the value of the outputs. When they move to America, they are doing to same thing to people who have value it more.
They don't necessarily value it more just because they are willing to pay more for it. The marginal utility/value of a dollar decreases with income.
You are, of course, right about this argument. But I still struggle with "open borders" in a way that, perhaps, you touch upon in your scalability comments.
Most libertarians believe, and I think that you fall into this camp also, that "culture" and "institutions" are extremely important for economic and social progress. Most libertarians also believe that, although not immutable, the impact of culture on an individual is fairly strong and durable. Putting these things together, I don't see how you can be in favor of "open borders" where the potential influx of people from radically different and potentially inimical cultures is very possible. This isn't the 19th century when the barriers to entry were large; entry into an "open borders" country is just the price of an airline ticket these days.
I think that these libertarian beliefs are completely compatible with a robust level of immigration, certainly higher and easier than the system we currently have, but only within the limits of the "melting pot" to absorb and inculcate. They are not compatible with "open borders" which could easily overrun these limits. I think that we are currently seeing precisely this effect in places like Scandinavia and Germany, where the sudden influx of immigrants is producing social issues and ghettoization. These countries are fundamentally less good at including immigrants so this is happening at a lower level of immigration than it would happen in the USA, but even the USA's capacity is not unlimited and it is likely much lower than the results that "open borders" would produce.
There is another argument for caution in this respect, which is namely that the results of an "open borders" policy are irreversible, assuming that no one is going to approve mass deportations if it proves to be excessive. So, although the limits of the USA to absorb immigrants succcessfully is unknowable, the irreversibility of the process argues for stepwise progress and not a radical change to "open borders."
Well put. As a card carrying libertarian (and melting-pot loving New Yorker) , I used to be pro-open borders. Then I saw what happened in some cities in Europe that have been completely changed by immigration. I think a root issue is that there are some norms that are fragile. There may be a norm in a town that quiet time starts at 10PM, and everyone in that town benefits since they all get a good night's sleep. It takes a very small absolute number of people making loud noise all night to hit a tipping point where the norm is lost forever, and then everyone is worse off. One could suggest that the norms should instead be made into laws, but in practice this is not practical for many reasons - one of which being that the culture of a place has many subtle norms that would be very hard to codify and then enforce. Again, I hate that this is true - but it is true in places that I have actually been, and the people who lived in those places are now understandably sad (and tired).
Have northern whites of The White Flight fame benefited from The Great northern migration? Just look at the size of the white population of New York, observe the revealed preferences. Their haircuts and car washes might have been cheaper. Until they found it unbearable to live in the city anymore.
The argument is off. I don't know if ultimately open borders impoverish or enrich a country, but the welfare enhancing mechanism described in this essay doesn't work for the simple reason that overall productivity is unaffected; immigrants simply converge to the prevailing level of factor productivity of the receiving nation and add to its overall stock of workers (unless we are talking about Indian or Korean PhDs or whatever, but that has clearly never been the focus of this debate, especially in countries like Germany or Italy who overwhelmingly receive low human capital immigrants).
It is tautological to say that they add to GDP (indeed, they could not work a single day of their lives and they would still enhance GDP because of increased welfare state spending), so that should be kept strictly separate from questions of incidence.
What can be argued is that open borders are welfare maximizing for the planet as a whole because they increase the productivity of the average human being, but people live in countries, not in the United States of Earth. Nevermind the fact that Emil freely acknowledges that immigrants see massive benefits (eg, entirely consistent with many people winning massively).
It remains an open question if the native population of a country simply increasing the size of its labour pool and observe, I repeat, no increase in its productivity, will benefit.
Also, the native population will have a smaller stake in the country, and will have to deal with the increase in population density and less natural resources per capita.
Are you under the impression France trades a lot with Afghanistan and Syria
>The people interested in trading with you immigrating from countries where they have low productivity to countries where they have high productivity and are at least as interested in trading with you gets you more gains from trade and therefore benefits you in expectation.
If there is little trade in the first place, it is entirely possible that the gains you are describing don't really outweight the known issues of immigration. In the European context it is basically beyond dispute that immigrants commit more crime and are a fiscal drag, for example.
Put another way: if the entire population of Afghanistan moved to Germany tomorrow, the effect would be the exact same as if the German population simply, organically, grew by 40 million people (assuming Afghans converge to German productivity and pro-social behaviours instantly; this is a big assumption). Why would it be the same? Because Germany has insignificant trade flows with Afghanistan. The "gains from trade" you describe don't really apply, do they?
Now, does Germany producing an extra 40 million human beings in one night enhance the welfare of the average German? Maybe. There's economies of scale, maybe some more innovation because young people like to tinker. But it's a maybe. It is possible that Germans actually rather enjoy being a country of X million people for whatever reasons.
Quote:
The really intellectually thorny question is whether these massive per-migrant gains are scalable. Can we reasonably hope to move billions of people to the First World without killing the goose that lays the golden eggs?
If the move happened overnight, then even I would say, “No.” Over the course of a century, however, I say, “No problem.”
/Quote
Bryan, this seems like a tacit retreat from your longstanding radical open borders position. Short of migration controls, what's the mechanism by which this change will be stretched out over a hundred years?
We've entered a world that's massively different than it was in 1980, let alone 1840. Even poor third-world people now have phones with internet connections and WhatsApp accounts. It's much easier for them to see what rich countries are like and much easier to figure out how to get into them. Transcontinental airplane and ship travel are within the financial reach of vastly larger numbers of people than they once were. Open borders in 2022 or 2030 would look more like a tsunami than like nineteenth-century Europeans coming to America on sailing ships.
I think you are strawmanning the position against immigration a bit. Not that there aren't people who believe any given thing on immigration, mind, but I don't think people, for the most part, are saying that incomes going up for one section of the country don't benefit others in some kind of weird absolute sense. (Though, I definitely think if you articulated this argument people would sneer at you for believing in 'trickle down' economics.)
Imagine John, an Indian worker who lives in India. He gets paid an amount X. He moves to America, now he gets paid 10x what he used to. Bosses be weird, but that's how it works.
You are saying, 'this is good for America, John is making 10x what he used to'. You are representing your opponents as saying 'this is nothing for America, John keeps those gains to himself'. Some may say that, but the thing to draw attention to here is that America is not multiplying the wages of a worker it had previously by 10x, it is gaining a new worker who works for this price. That might be good, it might be bad, but it is fundamentally different than the uncomplicated 'guy got a raise' case. Is having a new worker/inhabitant good overall? Well, depends on the person, yeah?
When you talk about John's income rising as 'gains', it's a bit deceptive. Previously an American boss paid 10% the salary overseas, kept the 90%. Now 100% is paid to an Indian worker living in America. Is it better, in the kind of trickling sideways incidence you are talking about, to be in the one state or the other? Certainly it is better for John, but it isn't immediately obvious that the rest of the economy benefits more from a worker with that money vs a company with 90% of that money. Again, it is going to depend on the worker.
Beyond that, there is the case of a worker who wasn't previously employed by an American country. He shows up, gets a job. Is that good or bad? Well, it might be either, but however we figure that out, it won't be measured that his salary has risen 90%. America has another laborer. Maybe that's good, maybe it isn't, but what is not the case is that the labor market has gotten a 10x raise.
Lastly, please forgive us our skepticism. You folks on the left are open about the fact that you are consequentialists, who will lie for what you consider good causes. That is totally reasonable from your POV. If you are saving the earth, what is your honor as a price? Imagine you told a few lies and got anti global warming stuff passed. Net gain, yeah? But from our perspective, you can see how we get into a 'once burned, twice shy' when faced with a conversational partner who lies shamelessly to take power, and sleeps easily that night. You get one freebie per generation, as each new set of right wingers learn this lesson. You are currently still in the 'burned' phase from legalizing weed, got to wait a decade or so for us to fall for your smooth talk again.
Bryan is neither a consequentialist nor on the left.
Open borders is so far left that it almost washes out the fact that Bryan is right on everything else.
He's right on this too.
Bryan is a single issue activist. That single issue is open borders. Caplan might agree with the right on more issues, like free market health care, deregulation, school choice, or shrinking + weakening government bureaucracies, etc, but as a pundit and activist, he rounds the importance of other issues to about zero, and he's effectively been a left-wing pundit + activist.
Talking about immigration as a rise in wages misses the point. Prices are just a reflection of underlying economic realities. An immigrant to the U.S. becomes more productive in the U.S. because they work under more fair/predictable/pro-market laws, because they work for more valuable enterprises, because they are able to start businesses serving wealthier consumers, etc. The whole idea is that we get to plug immigrant human capital into a giant economic machine that is fantastically good at using human capital (versus the baseline of other countries and world history).
dont agree with this comment but its interesting
Wait, what went wrong with legalizing weed? I haven't been paying attention
Not really making the argument, but as I understand it there is some suggestive correlation emerging between widespread/chronic use of marijuana concomitant with legalization, and significant increases in mental health disorders: anxieties, depressions, paranoia, mania and psychoses, schizophrenia, anhedonia, and also losses in fertility. Can’t speak to whether research will bear this out longitudinally and rigorously, but my anecdotal experience is that all my friends and acquaintances who became habitual users struggle with serious anxiety, and one of my friends, who had manageable mental health issues already, spiraled out into a bizarre years-long bipolar (mania and depression alternately, but not really apparently bipolar as-she-is-known in texts) episode that only reverted when he was forced clean for a period. His doctors chalked it up to an apparent bizarre effect of truly *staggering* amounts of marijuana use.
You may or may not be insane; that's not a term I bandy about. I don't know either of you. But I am an economist and understand how the labour market works. Immigration does benefit the migrant tremendously, but that is not the full extent of the impact. Even the full macroeconomic and microeconomic impacts do not tell the whole story.
I consider support for thin borders treason: it undermines our health and safety. http://rationalismisericordia.xyz/2017/07/13/a-case-for-open-borders/
And it was treason in the 19th century, when it harmed the U.S. irreparably. (?)
We cannot go back in time and see how a different immigration policy would have affected the US. You also ignore the fact that the 19th century is WILDLY different from our current country in every conceivable way. Non-existent welfare state, no multiculturalism or diversity, massive pressure to assimilate, different education levels, cultural mores, values and most importantly the US needed warm bodies to industrialize. That phase is over and with it, the need for more than de minims unskilled immigration.
In the 19th century naturalization was limited to whites and as soon as the US began seeing large scale Chinese immigration Chinese immigration was banned.
I very much appreciate that Caplan is openly willing address a critic like Emil without resorting to personal attacks.
But I wish Caplan would have also considered the potential damage to American culture and social capital (and their long term economic effects) that can happen when immigrants bring with them too much of the behaviors that have made their native countries poor and illiberal.
Caplan does consider those arguments in his cartoon book. but in my view his reply is poorly argued.
also, being a cartoon book isn't optimal for hashing out heavy issues.
Not only is it poorly argued, but there is no sense of risk/reward.
If it's really that easy to make people in the third world productive, then you would think they would have done it themselves by now. For Open Borders to make sense as a risk to take, you have to simultaneously believe that billions of people would be radically more productive in America and simultaneously believe that all of these billions of people in all their individual countries around the world will NEVER get their act together and create these magic "good institutions" no matter how long they have to do or or how many Bryan Caplan books they read.
After all, the easiest and low risk option is to just fix the countries these people live in already. Bryan almost seems to believe that's an impossible task, and that moving billions of people without impacting first world institutions would be easier.
The "easy" thing is moving to a place where all the stuff around you (institutions, technology etc) are very much better than where you come from. Getting the Haitian government to US level and Haitian machinery, internet connections, computers etc to US levels is very hard, or rather completely impossible for any Haitian worker, or large group of Haitian workers for that matter. Moving to US is a lot easier. Fixing a broken country is probably not as easy as you seem to believe.
And yet we fixed Japan and Germany quite quickly. It's amazing how quickly you can fix countries with good human capital, and amazing how impossible it is to fix countries with bad human capital.
Postwar Germany and Japan had very little in common with Haiti. You're saying that Germany was a third would country before "we fixed it?"
Yeah, what is that difference between the Germany and Japan vs Haiti? That one thing that Bryan just can't bring himself to consider?
point is: humans are part of said machinery. culture isn't just institutions, but also how the people behave and their attitudes.
"Fixing a broken country is probably not as easy as you seem to believe. "
Good thing there's no indication that immigration is turning the US into a broken country then. /s
I'm like Emil. massive admirer of all your work, but consider your immigration views to miss a lot.
1. do you disagree with the "China effect" recent argument? where a huge number of people went unemployed and lost their quality of life immediately due to imports from China?
displacement can be very real.
2. you assume that immigrants will not have negative effects on the culture (social capital) despite sociologists finding that areas with more immigrants have lower social trust etc.
3. you assume that immigrants will not participate enough in elections to turn the US into a Turkey, Russia, it Pakistan. the data of current immigrants election tendencies can't be used to extrapolate about when lots of immigrants will arrive.
4. it's very difficult for you to consider things from a purely self interested current US citizen. you agree to talk about it with gritted teeth, while for you liberty and the interests of migrants are still on top. very hard to steelman the opposite argument when you yourself feel so alienated by it
with great respect
Also don't we think that we should have not set on a course where many countries will have their native populations outnumbered by immigrants within our lifetimes (thus making it almost impossible to revert) until after we finish this debate, that has barely even began?
I would amend Emil's Twitter statement to include "employers" as the other group that benefits from low-skill immigration disproportionately.
The costs of course are distributed across a vast number of people in the form of tax burdens generated by the presence of that migrant worker and (typically) their family. They emerge in the form of crowding in public schools, more traffic, and higher prices for rivalrous goods like Healthcare and housing.
But I would take issue with the notion that immigrants magically become "more productive" because they're on our magic dirt. They may _earn_ more, but that doesn't make them more productive in an absolute sense. A cab driver in Port Au Prince moving to NY is still a cab driver. Prices are just higher in NY.
Being in America is much nicer than being in Haiti. That's because Americans built America and there's something special about the set of rules we used to construct this country and its institutions. To arbitrarily move every Haitian to America would simply recreate Haiti here in America. Our dirt isn't so magical that it could overwrite the negative cultural memes that created Haiti simply by placing a couple million Hatians here.
interesting point that part of the increased productivity is about using existing value/capital etc.
it might still mean more productivity, but need to adjust
The principle that “increased productivity enriches not just producers, but consumers” is an instance of what might be called “trickle sideways economics.”