Open borders violate freedom of association in a very basic fashion. Even if you can get a majority of a nation's citizens to vote for it, you are in effect letting them vote to abolish the nation itself. This inflicts a fundamental violation upon any remaining citizens who would prefer not to see their nation abolished, as unless they carry dual-citizenship, they have no other homeland to retreat to.
Roads violate my freedom of association. Every day thousands of people drive into and out of my town without my concent. The only way to secure my liberty is to ban all travel and transportation
If a large number of people in a town do not want any roads going through it, then yes, this would be more or less correct. This would go for double if the town was founded based on an explicit understanding that there will be no roads going through it.
As Noah Carl says, it all depends who the immigrants are. If they are skilled, well-educated, high achievers then they tend to be very good for the economy. If they are unskilled and low IQ then they tend to be very bad for both the economy and the culture of the receiving country. That is certainly the experience of Britain and most other western European countries. I'm curious as to how Bryan's interpretation of the data varies so wildly from that of people such as Emil Kirkegaard and Ed Dutton.
Of course one thing he didn't mention is the fact that the more diversity you get, the less social capital you get, a finding of the left-wing academic Robert Putnam. No doubt Bryan would say diversity only happens in the first generation of immigrants, after that their children integrate. I'd invite him to come to England and view the increasing number of Muslim women wearing the hijab. And of course if he's mainly talking about the children of immigrants then his argument that we don't have the financial burden of educating them is not valid: we actually DO educate the children of immigrants with resultant costs.
Evidence from Denmark suggests that at no point in their lives are immigrants from MENA countries beneficial to the economy, not even the period of their lives when they should be working, i.e. after their education costs have been paid and before they start receiving pensions.
All this apart, white Brits now constitute fewer than 30% of my hometown (when I was born 65 years ago it was 99%) and there is no noticeable slowing of support for welfare, nor is anyone other than a Labour (the welfare party) candidate voted into local office. The UK's GDP per capita has gone down as the GDP has remained stubbornly level, so mass immigration doesn't appear to have brought the economic benefits to Britain that Bryan is claiming. All that has really changed is that I now share my town with people who neither look, sound, nor behave like me. I certainly don't feel it's 'my town' anymore and am currently thinking up ways to escape the sheer ugliness of the place.
All Bryan's claims seem to rest on the assumption that the state won't be giving immigrants benefits, welfare cheques and free housing but that is not the world we live in, certainly not here in the caring sharing UK. Already a large proportion of the homeless on our streets are immigrants. Why would we allow more in to sleep rough on our streets and inevitably turn to crime to stay alive. Once they're here, it may be simply cheaper and less disruptive for society to give them all a house and welfare, of which there is already too little and too much respectively.
In short, Bryan's claim that 'immigration is good' is far too general a statement to be meaningful.
"I'm curious as to how Bryan's interpretation of the data varies so wildly from that of people such as Emil Kirkegaard and Ed Dutton."
1) He primarily looks at immigration to the US and not the EU.
Immigrants who arrive in the US are probably more skilled than Middle-Eastern immigrants who arrive in Europe, and there is less broad welfare state in the United States (you have to work to get welfare assistance)
2) He looks at it from a global and not a national perspective.
A Haiti immigrant can move to the US to work, receiving an income of 20 000 dollars per year, which greatly improves his and his family's life (Haitian median wage is 1700 USD, or 3300 in purchasing power parity), and even if he pays 2000 dollars less in taxes than he receives, that's overall a net improvement.
Yes, you are certainly right with your first point. I assumed Bryan was talking about immigration in general but perhaps he is mainly talking about immigration to the US and as you say, the immigrants we get in Europe and our generous welfare state make things very different here to there.
On your second point you are also almost certainly right, but at the risk of sounding heartless, my main concern is with the living standards of Europeans rather than the immigrants who come here and Emil Kirkegaard's figures show that immigrants from outside the EU are clearly a net drain on our economies, taking far more out in welfare than they will ever contribute. Of course the immigrants' standard of living goes up by orders of magnitude but that's scant consolation for the natives who see both their economies and their culture slowly being eroded away. And what is galling is people like Bryan keep claiming we simply haven't understood that it's in our own interest to let in anyone who wants to come and how, viewed from a world perspective, moving people from low productivity countries to high productivity countries represents a massive gain in productivity and efficiency. True, but I'm less interested in the big world picture and more interested in how my country is unrecognisable from how it was when I was born - and not for the better.
Thanks. I can now write you off, unsub, and completely ignore anything you wrote or said or ever will whether online, in books, or via other forums anywhere, any time. Turning the USA into Haiti or South Africa seems, to my small and bitter mind, a project not worth the undertaking. I'll hold that view until either Haiti or RSA becomes a garden worth emulating or I die of old age. Any guesses which?
Well argued. Every journey begins with a first step.
I agree that we should be allowing in immigrants. To make this palatable, they need to be excluded from welfare, they need to pass a background check (via a third party service) of no criminality, they need to be prohibited from voting, and they need to pay double the SS/FICA (paid by the employer with IRS enforcement). Just as importantly, they need to all be testably fluent in English, and have a college degree. I would also entertain a large financial bond, that would be forfeited if they commit a crime, fail to pay taxes, vote, or eat pets (last part is a joke).
I think millions of people would get in line to come here annually. This would offset our population implosion, support our cash strapped retirement programs, foster entrepreneurial spirits, and set a beacon which the rest of the world would need to respond to as we would siphon their best and brightest and point the way to avoid the death spiral of population collapse.
Only problems I see are that both political parties would hate it for the opposite reasons.
Open borders NGOs and others responsible for this self-destructive, civilization destroying policy will be placed against the wall along with the rest of those that subverted and destroyed this nation.
FINALLY a serious argument from you. My patience is at last rewarded, this was worth reading.
Which is not to say that I entirely agree with you, but as I've noted previously, reading positions from people with whom I disagree is pretty much the only reason I'm still subscribed here, so that's actually another point in favor of the article.
So, let's get to the points of disagreement.
First, you don't specify ANY limits on who we let in. I'd argue that we not only have a right to consider background checks to exclude known criminals and terrorists, we have a moral responsibility to do so.
Secondly, your claim that other nations have already borne the burden of education doesn't necessarily reassure. Perhaps we can agree that immigrants ought to pass the equivalent of a high school graduation test. (Given the abysmal state of our own education system that ought to be a fairly low bar).
Third, while I might be willing to agree on principle with work requirements, ineligibility for benefits, and ineligibility to vote, I have strong doubts that those would be consistently enforced. Illegal aliens already work, receive benefits, and sometimes vote, despite all of those already being clearly illegal. I have zero confidence that the goalposts wouldn't be almost immediately moved to granting benefits, allowing ever broader exceptions to work requirements, and voting rights, with de facto nullification of law enforcement. It's hard to imagine any scenario where having a large foreign population denied voting rights and government support would NOT invite accusations of creating an Apartheid State.
That's even aside from the issue of a cultural literacy test. I can't think of anything that would flip Republican attitudes in favor of wholesale immigration faster than the opportunity to impose an ideological litmus test as a requirement on entry, but they sure as Hell wouldn't let Democrats write or grade THAT test and I can't imagine that Democrats would be any more willing to let Republicans do it. Nearly half of each of our own Parties currently considers the other half "dangerous", so the last thing they'll want to do is let the other side recruit more numbers from outside. If we can't agree with each other what needs to be taught in Civics (or even IF it needs to be taught), how are we going to agree on the test?
Fourth, your comic at the end genuinely made me laugh, but probably not for the reason its author intended. Our most diverse multicultural cities are NOT doing fine from my perspective. They have massive crime problems, corruption in government, bureaucratic inefficiency, vast wealth inequality, segregated ethnic enclaves, and often racially coded gang violence. I do not regard them as particularly successful examples of assimilation into American culture. Europe has done this experiment already and ended up with urban ghettoes even law enforcement fears to enter. There are strong arguments that there is an upper limit on how fast a foreign population can be successfully integrated and how high the percentage of foreign born can get within a country before it results in balkanization. Even if I regarded immigration as an entirely good thing (rather than a mixed set of trade-offs), the dosage makes the poison. I've had too close a view to the failures of attempted "Nation Building" overseas to believe that it's safe, cheap, or easy to bring a foreign People around to embracing Western values and culture en mass. A person may join a People as an individual, but it's historically rare for two Peoples to join together without conquest or oppression of one over the other. Again, if we can't currently manage unity between our own internal factions of Americans, what gives you confidence that we can achieve unity with literally anyone from anywhere?
Fifth, let's not be overly dismissive of the economic dislocation for native workers. Successful transitions are GRADUAL. The available social safety nets are limited, as are the training pipelines into alternative employment, and realistically unlimited migration would disproportionately impact low skill low paid work, so that's precisely the native workers with the least resources to absorb a pay cut as the labor pool expands or pay the costs of retraining. Even if we somehow managed to enforce the work requirements and benefit ineligibility, I'm not blind to the downward pressure that would put on wages. Cheaper consumer products and services won't help the working man much if his net purchasing power is dropping even faster. Likewise, we already have issues with affordable housing and insufficient housing construction that is unlikely to be remedied within the next decade. So, even aside from cultural assimilation concerns, there's also practical upper limits on how fast we can economically integrate new arrivals and how fast our infrastructure can scale up to support that population increase. Even if I accepted your dubious claim that immigrants tend to be net neutral on taxes, those issues would clearly increase the needs of native workers on benefits.
Lastly, the "they're people too" argument utterly falls flat on making a false equivalency. Any fellow citizen is another person too, but I'm under no moral obligation to invite them into my home. I assume that wherever you live, you lock your door sometimes. Your space here is not open to unlimited guest postings of articles under your name. It isn't your livelihood that would be detrimentally impacted. This is so reminiscent of people who live in gated communities with private security advocating to open the boarder and defund ICE. Freedom of Association includes the Freedom to NOT Associate. Property Rights include the Right to have fences and eject trespassers. Sovereignty includes the authority to establish laws and rights that apply exclusively to legal citizens of the jurisdiction. None of these deny "personhood" to anyone else. Personhood does not include any right to force unwilling association, to trespass upon the property of others, or claim to the benefits of citizenship without actually meeting the requirements of that citizenship.
So, you've got no moral argument that we ought to do this. You DO have a serious economic argument, but it's ultimately a broadly vague argument that things would be ultimately better for the nation overall, but it doesn't really address the parts of the nation and the economy who would be the losers in that change and it doesn't grapple much with the practical limitations in implementation for your suggested mitigations. I suppose there's only so much you can fit in any single article, but there was room for more here.
Still, it's the best article you've written in quite a while. You didn't insult or blatantly dismiss anyone. No irrelevant snide shots at "rightoids" or "gribbles". No elitist punching down about "low human capital". You made a genuine effort to identify legitimate objections and what seems to be a good faith attempt to answer them. This is the kind of writing that led me to subscribe in the first place.
Since somebody will probably make some inaccurate assumptions about my own position: I favor legal immigration, with background checks, for people with work visas, with the option for citizenship after some years of being a productive, law-abiding resident. I think the numbers we admit need to be rationally calculated based on taking into account the issues I raised above: impact to native workers, capacity of available infrastructure, rate of cultural assimilation, percentage of foreign born, etc. Hence why I'm one of those Republicans who confuse survey writers by telling them that I favor MORE legal immigration and want to hire MORE immigration judges to speed immigration processing while ALSO wanting to "Build the Wall", deport ALL illegal immigrants, and raise the standards for Asylum claims. In a lot of ways, I want an immigration system that looks more like Australia's.
I agree wholeheartedly, if we implement everything after your “Still worried?” comments. I think those are reasonable safeguards for the real world we live in, with everything from the welfare state problem to criminal gangs and Islamic terrorism.
Let’s bring in productive people who want to assimilate into Western Culture!
Is there a path to citizenship in this plan? Otherwise do you create a permanent underclass of people who live somewhere but have no say in its governance?
Hopefully, within my lifetime, this idea that the nations of the Earth must become culturally-flattened economic zones wherein hostile foreigners prey upon the natives will be recognized for the evil it is. Hopefully, charlatans such as yourself are exposed as evil as well.
I propose we run Caplan's experiment on Israel first, since it would qualify as wealthy and democratic. We should see results after say ten years, at which time any country that likes the results can do it too. I assume Caplan would have no problem with Israel going first, unless he is trying to be sneaky...
Bryan, this comment is not directed at this blog post so much as your push for open borders in general. I deeply respect you and your work, but I find that you far too easily discount the potential downsides of mass legal immigration, not least of which are very obvious security concerns. I strongly urge you to listen to this podcast with Richard Epstein, which I think lays out a good case for why open borders is an absurd policy: https://ricochet.com/podcast/the-libertarian/borderline-insanity-why-increasing-immigration-doesnt-mean-embracing-open-borders/.
Open borders violate freedom of association in a very basic fashion. Even if you can get a majority of a nation's citizens to vote for it, you are in effect letting them vote to abolish the nation itself. This inflicts a fundamental violation upon any remaining citizens who would prefer not to see their nation abolished, as unless they carry dual-citizenship, they have no other homeland to retreat to.
Roads violate my freedom of association. Every day thousands of people drive into and out of my town without my concent. The only way to secure my liberty is to ban all travel and transportation
If a large number of people in a town do not want any roads going through it, then yes, this would be more or less correct. This would go for double if the town was founded based on an explicit understanding that there will be no roads going through it.
By and large I support the logic of the arguments. My biggest concern is with the evidence on assimilation from Europe.
As Noah Carl says, it all depends who the immigrants are. If they are skilled, well-educated, high achievers then they tend to be very good for the economy. If they are unskilled and low IQ then they tend to be very bad for both the economy and the culture of the receiving country. That is certainly the experience of Britain and most other western European countries. I'm curious as to how Bryan's interpretation of the data varies so wildly from that of people such as Emil Kirkegaard and Ed Dutton.
Of course one thing he didn't mention is the fact that the more diversity you get, the less social capital you get, a finding of the left-wing academic Robert Putnam. No doubt Bryan would say diversity only happens in the first generation of immigrants, after that their children integrate. I'd invite him to come to England and view the increasing number of Muslim women wearing the hijab. And of course if he's mainly talking about the children of immigrants then his argument that we don't have the financial burden of educating them is not valid: we actually DO educate the children of immigrants with resultant costs.
Evidence from Denmark suggests that at no point in their lives are immigrants from MENA countries beneficial to the economy, not even the period of their lives when they should be working, i.e. after their education costs have been paid and before they start receiving pensions.
All this apart, white Brits now constitute fewer than 30% of my hometown (when I was born 65 years ago it was 99%) and there is no noticeable slowing of support for welfare, nor is anyone other than a Labour (the welfare party) candidate voted into local office. The UK's GDP per capita has gone down as the GDP has remained stubbornly level, so mass immigration doesn't appear to have brought the economic benefits to Britain that Bryan is claiming. All that has really changed is that I now share my town with people who neither look, sound, nor behave like me. I certainly don't feel it's 'my town' anymore and am currently thinking up ways to escape the sheer ugliness of the place.
All Bryan's claims seem to rest on the assumption that the state won't be giving immigrants benefits, welfare cheques and free housing but that is not the world we live in, certainly not here in the caring sharing UK. Already a large proportion of the homeless on our streets are immigrants. Why would we allow more in to sleep rough on our streets and inevitably turn to crime to stay alive. Once they're here, it may be simply cheaper and less disruptive for society to give them all a house and welfare, of which there is already too little and too much respectively.
In short, Bryan's claim that 'immigration is good' is far too general a statement to be meaningful.
Caplan is clearly driven by egalitarian ideology moreso than any sort of data, experience, observations, etc.
"I'm curious as to how Bryan's interpretation of the data varies so wildly from that of people such as Emil Kirkegaard and Ed Dutton."
1) He primarily looks at immigration to the US and not the EU.
Immigrants who arrive in the US are probably more skilled than Middle-Eastern immigrants who arrive in Europe, and there is less broad welfare state in the United States (you have to work to get welfare assistance)
2) He looks at it from a global and not a national perspective.
A Haiti immigrant can move to the US to work, receiving an income of 20 000 dollars per year, which greatly improves his and his family's life (Haitian median wage is 1700 USD, or 3300 in purchasing power parity), and even if he pays 2000 dollars less in taxes than he receives, that's overall a net improvement.
Yes, you are certainly right with your first point. I assumed Bryan was talking about immigration in general but perhaps he is mainly talking about immigration to the US and as you say, the immigrants we get in Europe and our generous welfare state make things very different here to there.
On your second point you are also almost certainly right, but at the risk of sounding heartless, my main concern is with the living standards of Europeans rather than the immigrants who come here and Emil Kirkegaard's figures show that immigrants from outside the EU are clearly a net drain on our economies, taking far more out in welfare than they will ever contribute. Of course the immigrants' standard of living goes up by orders of magnitude but that's scant consolation for the natives who see both their economies and their culture slowly being eroded away. And what is galling is people like Bryan keep claiming we simply haven't understood that it's in our own interest to let in anyone who wants to come and how, viewed from a world perspective, moving people from low productivity countries to high productivity countries represents a massive gain in productivity and efficiency. True, but I'm less interested in the big world picture and more interested in how my country is unrecognisable from how it was when I was born - and not for the better.
Thanks. I can now write you off, unsub, and completely ignore anything you wrote or said or ever will whether online, in books, or via other forums anywhere, any time. Turning the USA into Haiti or South Africa seems, to my small and bitter mind, a project not worth the undertaking. I'll hold that view until either Haiti or RSA becomes a garden worth emulating or I die of old age. Any guesses which?
Well argued. Every journey begins with a first step.
I agree that we should be allowing in immigrants. To make this palatable, they need to be excluded from welfare, they need to pass a background check (via a third party service) of no criminality, they need to be prohibited from voting, and they need to pay double the SS/FICA (paid by the employer with IRS enforcement). Just as importantly, they need to all be testably fluent in English, and have a college degree. I would also entertain a large financial bond, that would be forfeited if they commit a crime, fail to pay taxes, vote, or eat pets (last part is a joke).
I think millions of people would get in line to come here annually. This would offset our population implosion, support our cash strapped retirement programs, foster entrepreneurial spirits, and set a beacon which the rest of the world would need to respond to as we would siphon their best and brightest and point the way to avoid the death spiral of population collapse.
Only problems I see are that both political parties would hate it for the opposite reasons.
Open borders NGOs and others responsible for this self-destructive, civilization destroying policy will be placed against the wall along with the rest of those that subverted and destroyed this nation.
FINALLY a serious argument from you. My patience is at last rewarded, this was worth reading.
Which is not to say that I entirely agree with you, but as I've noted previously, reading positions from people with whom I disagree is pretty much the only reason I'm still subscribed here, so that's actually another point in favor of the article.
So, let's get to the points of disagreement.
First, you don't specify ANY limits on who we let in. I'd argue that we not only have a right to consider background checks to exclude known criminals and terrorists, we have a moral responsibility to do so.
Secondly, your claim that other nations have already borne the burden of education doesn't necessarily reassure. Perhaps we can agree that immigrants ought to pass the equivalent of a high school graduation test. (Given the abysmal state of our own education system that ought to be a fairly low bar).
Third, while I might be willing to agree on principle with work requirements, ineligibility for benefits, and ineligibility to vote, I have strong doubts that those would be consistently enforced. Illegal aliens already work, receive benefits, and sometimes vote, despite all of those already being clearly illegal. I have zero confidence that the goalposts wouldn't be almost immediately moved to granting benefits, allowing ever broader exceptions to work requirements, and voting rights, with de facto nullification of law enforcement. It's hard to imagine any scenario where having a large foreign population denied voting rights and government support would NOT invite accusations of creating an Apartheid State.
That's even aside from the issue of a cultural literacy test. I can't think of anything that would flip Republican attitudes in favor of wholesale immigration faster than the opportunity to impose an ideological litmus test as a requirement on entry, but they sure as Hell wouldn't let Democrats write or grade THAT test and I can't imagine that Democrats would be any more willing to let Republicans do it. Nearly half of each of our own Parties currently considers the other half "dangerous", so the last thing they'll want to do is let the other side recruit more numbers from outside. If we can't agree with each other what needs to be taught in Civics (or even IF it needs to be taught), how are we going to agree on the test?
Fourth, your comic at the end genuinely made me laugh, but probably not for the reason its author intended. Our most diverse multicultural cities are NOT doing fine from my perspective. They have massive crime problems, corruption in government, bureaucratic inefficiency, vast wealth inequality, segregated ethnic enclaves, and often racially coded gang violence. I do not regard them as particularly successful examples of assimilation into American culture. Europe has done this experiment already and ended up with urban ghettoes even law enforcement fears to enter. There are strong arguments that there is an upper limit on how fast a foreign population can be successfully integrated and how high the percentage of foreign born can get within a country before it results in balkanization. Even if I regarded immigration as an entirely good thing (rather than a mixed set of trade-offs), the dosage makes the poison. I've had too close a view to the failures of attempted "Nation Building" overseas to believe that it's safe, cheap, or easy to bring a foreign People around to embracing Western values and culture en mass. A person may join a People as an individual, but it's historically rare for two Peoples to join together without conquest or oppression of one over the other. Again, if we can't currently manage unity between our own internal factions of Americans, what gives you confidence that we can achieve unity with literally anyone from anywhere?
Fifth, let's not be overly dismissive of the economic dislocation for native workers. Successful transitions are GRADUAL. The available social safety nets are limited, as are the training pipelines into alternative employment, and realistically unlimited migration would disproportionately impact low skill low paid work, so that's precisely the native workers with the least resources to absorb a pay cut as the labor pool expands or pay the costs of retraining. Even if we somehow managed to enforce the work requirements and benefit ineligibility, I'm not blind to the downward pressure that would put on wages. Cheaper consumer products and services won't help the working man much if his net purchasing power is dropping even faster. Likewise, we already have issues with affordable housing and insufficient housing construction that is unlikely to be remedied within the next decade. So, even aside from cultural assimilation concerns, there's also practical upper limits on how fast we can economically integrate new arrivals and how fast our infrastructure can scale up to support that population increase. Even if I accepted your dubious claim that immigrants tend to be net neutral on taxes, those issues would clearly increase the needs of native workers on benefits.
Lastly, the "they're people too" argument utterly falls flat on making a false equivalency. Any fellow citizen is another person too, but I'm under no moral obligation to invite them into my home. I assume that wherever you live, you lock your door sometimes. Your space here is not open to unlimited guest postings of articles under your name. It isn't your livelihood that would be detrimentally impacted. This is so reminiscent of people who live in gated communities with private security advocating to open the boarder and defund ICE. Freedom of Association includes the Freedom to NOT Associate. Property Rights include the Right to have fences and eject trespassers. Sovereignty includes the authority to establish laws and rights that apply exclusively to legal citizens of the jurisdiction. None of these deny "personhood" to anyone else. Personhood does not include any right to force unwilling association, to trespass upon the property of others, or claim to the benefits of citizenship without actually meeting the requirements of that citizenship.
So, you've got no moral argument that we ought to do this. You DO have a serious economic argument, but it's ultimately a broadly vague argument that things would be ultimately better for the nation overall, but it doesn't really address the parts of the nation and the economy who would be the losers in that change and it doesn't grapple much with the practical limitations in implementation for your suggested mitigations. I suppose there's only so much you can fit in any single article, but there was room for more here.
Still, it's the best article you've written in quite a while. You didn't insult or blatantly dismiss anyone. No irrelevant snide shots at "rightoids" or "gribbles". No elitist punching down about "low human capital". You made a genuine effort to identify legitimate objections and what seems to be a good faith attempt to answer them. This is the kind of writing that led me to subscribe in the first place.
Since somebody will probably make some inaccurate assumptions about my own position: I favor legal immigration, with background checks, for people with work visas, with the option for citizenship after some years of being a productive, law-abiding resident. I think the numbers we admit need to be rationally calculated based on taking into account the issues I raised above: impact to native workers, capacity of available infrastructure, rate of cultural assimilation, percentage of foreign born, etc. Hence why I'm one of those Republicans who confuse survey writers by telling them that I favor MORE legal immigration and want to hire MORE immigration judges to speed immigration processing while ALSO wanting to "Build the Wall", deport ALL illegal immigrants, and raise the standards for Asylum claims. In a lot of ways, I want an immigration system that looks more like Australia's.
I agree wholeheartedly, if we implement everything after your “Still worried?” comments. I think those are reasonable safeguards for the real world we live in, with everything from the welfare state problem to criminal gangs and Islamic terrorism.
Let’s bring in productive people who want to assimilate into Western Culture!
Is there a path to citizenship in this plan? Otherwise do you create a permanent underclass of people who live somewhere but have no say in its governance?
Hopefully, within my lifetime, this idea that the nations of the Earth must become culturally-flattened economic zones wherein hostile foreigners prey upon the natives will be recognized for the evil it is. Hopefully, charlatans such as yourself are exposed as evil as well.
Bryan Caplan should be deported to Israel first.
A deeply confused and fallacy filled piece of writing.
Could you elaborate on what you see as the confusions and fallacies?
I propose we run Caplan's experiment on Israel first, since it would qualify as wealthy and democratic. We should see results after say ten years, at which time any country that likes the results can do it too. I assume Caplan would have no problem with Israel going first, unless he is trying to be sneaky...
Bryan, this comment is not directed at this blog post so much as your push for open borders in general. I deeply respect you and your work, but I find that you far too easily discount the potential downsides of mass legal immigration, not least of which are very obvious security concerns. I strongly urge you to listen to this podcast with Richard Epstein, which I think lays out a good case for why open borders is an absurd policy: https://ricochet.com/podcast/the-libertarian/borderline-insanity-why-increasing-immigration-doesnt-mean-embracing-open-borders/.
Impossible to check an immigrants background for past criminal behaviour.
You can check how ugly they are and make a good guess just by looking at them.
Prestigious!
Bravo.