This is reasonable. Emigration is happening in multiple countries and they are all offering different deals, and so it's a dynamic game with different effects on different players. Our current system is let people who don't respect rules in, or patient and people with the ability to and luck to get through the bureaucracy seems like we're not playing the best strategy. I take Brian's moral arguments seriously, and wish to live in a world in which people can move more freely, but you need to acknowledge that some folks have negative value and one goal of our system is to ensuring we have as few of those as possible. One by not letting them in, and two through creating a united culture that makes it makes it unlikely people born here become negative in terms of value.
My synthesis of Bryan and Garret jones is we can let as many people as possible who produce positive value, as long as we can create rules that accomdiate growth easily.
The other issue with Bryans arguments is that it justifies colonialism. Would Mexico be as rich as the US if we just took over and imposed our rules instead of theirs? If yes than immigration isn't needed, if no, then why would you assume immigration of their entire population add value? You can't have it both ways. I can see some ways to reslove this, but not many
In general, the larger the deviation one makes from the status quo, the more unpredictable the results. I would like to believe that we could move to something close to open borders. But my Burkean side says to proceed gradually. Radical proposals often make useful thought experiments, but I don’t trust them to work out in practice.
I think a stronger version of Bryan’s argument is something like: Here are a bunch of reasons why open borders could work out really well. Let’s take some incremental steps in that direction and see how it goes. If things go well, we’ll move further. If unexpected problems arise, let’s figure out how to mitigate them before pushing further.
It seems unclear to me what would count as gradual here. The obvious candidate is to let in a few more people legally, by increasing quotas or lowering restrictions. But would this signal cause the current stream of illegal entry to shift to legal entry? Or would it encourage even more illegal entry? If the policy seems permanent, it lowers the cost of legal entry, meaning more persons would tend to choose it, but it isn’t clear that it would not also increase demand generally, with unclear effects on illegal entry. If it is credibly temporary, with ever less restrictive policies on the horizon, does that cause people to want to wait enough to have the desired effect? I’m not sure.
Would anything else count as “gradual”? What is a good way to ease into having more immigration, while reserving the ability to reverse the policy if things don’t work out?
BTW: 2 people arrive in America and intend to stay: one by crossing the border, the other by emerging from a birth canal. Both will be "competing for jobs". Why do we think they are so different?
WEIRD (Western, Educated, individualized, rich, democratic) culture is very different from other cultures around the world, so someone born into it would be very different from someone who migrated.
One relevant difference is that WEIRD culture is more likely to play fair with a set of rules, and non WEIRD culture is more likely to subvert them. There are socio-economic reasons of course for this difference but it highlights the fact that yes, the two people you mentioned are different in ways that will affect the culture of society.
Yet many American citizens hate America and take freedom for granted. While immigrants are self selected to love American. I am one of those immigrants.
I would like to see Bryan engaging with I/o on X, who is a data oriented account that holds the centrist position on immigration, which is that some immigrant groups are a net positive and others a net negative, increasing disorder and not successfully becoming productive. I/o specifically points to Muslim immigration in Europe as an example of an “open borders” style policy that has gone poorly for host countries. I think Bryan addresses this concern by saying that host countries should simply not extend benefits and ??? For the disorder. It’s not a convincing response and doesn’t seem thought through. A debate on X would be interesting.
It sounds sophisticated but it boils down to "when there is a common interest that people’s individual actions don’t necessarily maximize, I think that there is a role for the government is to make good “trades” to maximize this common interest (and not make the bad trades)"
Much of the case for open borders by Bryan is questioning that the government should make these choices, both from a moral and and economic efficiency perspective
That doesn't mean nobody makes these choices (e.g. adverse selection decisions are done by private organisations, businesses, landlords, individuals).
Where Bryan's case is challenging is when people don't see past the premise above of "government should organise common interest" (at which level of government? size? and people just assume it's the nation state or the US federal government).
He's trying to give people good reasons that makes it fit into their way of thinking, but that's eventually where people find inconsistencies or aren't able to grasp with the full idea.
Do you intend to reply to Ryan McMaken's article "Haiti: Why Open Borders Don’t Work in the Developing World"? Maybe in the future, I reply to this article.
Talking about immigration, I am doing some research about German immigration to Brazil, since I am a German Brazilian. My great-great-grandfather came during the 1820s to fight in the Cisplatine War as Dom Pedro I mercenary.
This is a great demonstration of why the moral argument has to be primary. The bottom line is that human beings should be free to identify and pursue their rational values and achieve their best life in the place where they're most able to do that by their own judgment. What that means for any country's economy is secondary, although the fact is that the more productive people a country attracts, the better off it'll be.
To paraphrase Milton Friedman: though an open-borders immigration policy may prove advantageous for a host country's current inhabitants if immigrants must fend for themselves, accepting all comers when substantial benefits are available to them at public expense is a very different kettle of fish.
This is a good point but it’s not adverse selection, it is simply that the current marginal high skill immigrant is net good whereas if we expanded immigration a lot then the counterfactual marginal immigrant would be substantially different and probably substantially worse. It is not that the worst people choose to immigrate (at least legally) but that actually the best do currently but that would change if we moved the margin. The implication being that we should cautiously permit more high skill immigration but stop before the point where we are legally allowing the sorts that are currently asylum seekers (which obviously should be halted).
I’m not sure how to interpret “adverse selection” in this circumstance.
Does it mean some immigrants would not experience increased wages and increase production? Or does it mean some immigrants are criminals who would increase their own wages but have a net negative effect on production?
The first seems unlikely, unless you buy into the idea that immigrants go on welfare to a large extent (or perhaps more of them would under more relaxed restrictions). No matter how low your wage is in the US, if you have a job, it pays better than the corresponding job in Haiti. So the question boils down to, will they be employed?
The second seems unlikely, as criminals would seem less likely to be discouraged by legal restrictions on immigration. Gangsters don’t need to wait for better legal immigration policies, since breaking the law is kind of their thing.
Is there some other interpretation that I am missing?
One interpretation that obviously fails is that increased immigration has negative effects on current residents. If this is true, it seems unlikely that there is the sort of asymmetric information that leads to adverse selection.
His point about Ukraine is relevant to how "asylum" laws apply to "refugees" today. It's not longer required that the country be a warzone, instead merely having lots of crime/homicide suffices, as does being unable to manage natural disasters.
The "typical person" is irrelevant to questions of justice and honor, because the point of structuring social relationships according to such virtues is to regulate the behavior of the specific individuals one is interacting with. To the extent that a state is engaged in protecting the rights of people residing within its territory, then a given instance of border-crossing by a non-resident has to be judged in the context of whether or not their entry into the country contributes to a violation of the rights of its residents. Crossing a border may be one step the process of initiating a harm, so pre-empting a series of harmful actions before the harm is fully manifested by stopping someone at the border is justified as a defensive act on behalf of the residents.
On the other hand, the ruling class of a state is usually interested in exploiting their resident subjects, and perhaps in using immigrants as a means of furthering such exploitation. Immigration means something quite different in a classical liberal state versus a state characterized by welfarism, interventionism, and imperialism. In the latter case, many residents may well view immigrants as competitors for state-created privileges, immunities, and subsidies; as harboring potentially violent resentments against the native-born due to their prior experiences with imperialist aggression; and as political allies of ruling class groups that seek to intensify the burdens of statism on the native-born.
The advocacy of open borders has to be coupled to an advocacy of rolling back these other aspects of statism. To the extent that the existence of various harms are correlated to immigrants, one must change the terms of the debate to address the actual causes of these harms rather than blaming immigration.
I think the Mariel Boatlift is the best real-life example of adverse selection in immigration. The immigrants in that event were not self-selected, but selected by a hostile dictator.
Wow - quite the sophisticated analysis by Khale (probably a talented Quant)! There are many reasonable objections to unlimited mass immigration - just look at what is happening across the pond in the UK where exponential increases in non-European immigrants have had a negative fiscal impact and created enormous amounts of cultural conflict. However, many favor immigration provided that it is subject to reasonable constraints such as skill requirements. I personally favor a requirement for formal invitation from citizens or companies willing to assume liability for any taxpayer or criminal expenses incurred.
This is reasonable. Emigration is happening in multiple countries and they are all offering different deals, and so it's a dynamic game with different effects on different players. Our current system is let people who don't respect rules in, or patient and people with the ability to and luck to get through the bureaucracy seems like we're not playing the best strategy. I take Brian's moral arguments seriously, and wish to live in a world in which people can move more freely, but you need to acknowledge that some folks have negative value and one goal of our system is to ensuring we have as few of those as possible. One by not letting them in, and two through creating a united culture that makes it makes it unlikely people born here become negative in terms of value.
My synthesis of Bryan and Garret jones is we can let as many people as possible who produce positive value, as long as we can create rules that accomdiate growth easily.
The other issue with Bryans arguments is that it justifies colonialism. Would Mexico be as rich as the US if we just took over and imposed our rules instead of theirs? If yes than immigration isn't needed, if no, then why would you assume immigration of their entire population add value? You can't have it both ways. I can see some ways to reslove this, but not many
In general, the larger the deviation one makes from the status quo, the more unpredictable the results. I would like to believe that we could move to something close to open borders. But my Burkean side says to proceed gradually. Radical proposals often make useful thought experiments, but I don’t trust them to work out in practice.
I think a stronger version of Bryan’s argument is something like: Here are a bunch of reasons why open borders could work out really well. Let’s take some incremental steps in that direction and see how it goes. If things go well, we’ll move further. If unexpected problems arise, let’s figure out how to mitigate them before pushing further.
It seems unclear to me what would count as gradual here. The obvious candidate is to let in a few more people legally, by increasing quotas or lowering restrictions. But would this signal cause the current stream of illegal entry to shift to legal entry? Or would it encourage even more illegal entry? If the policy seems permanent, it lowers the cost of legal entry, meaning more persons would tend to choose it, but it isn’t clear that it would not also increase demand generally, with unclear effects on illegal entry. If it is credibly temporary, with ever less restrictive policies on the horizon, does that cause people to want to wait enough to have the desired effect? I’m not sure.
Would anything else count as “gradual”? What is a good way to ease into having more immigration, while reserving the ability to reverse the policy if things don’t work out?
BTW: 2 people arrive in America and intend to stay: one by crossing the border, the other by emerging from a birth canal. Both will be "competing for jobs". Why do we think they are so different?
Read https://www.robkhenderson.com/p/the-rise-of-western-individualism.
WEIRD (Western, Educated, individualized, rich, democratic) culture is very different from other cultures around the world, so someone born into it would be very different from someone who migrated.
One relevant difference is that WEIRD culture is more likely to play fair with a set of rules, and non WEIRD culture is more likely to subvert them. There are socio-economic reasons of course for this difference but it highlights the fact that yes, the two people you mentioned are different in ways that will affect the culture of society.
Yet many American citizens hate America and take freedom for granted. While immigrants are self selected to love American. I am one of those immigrants.
I would like to see Bryan engaging with I/o on X, who is a data oriented account that holds the centrist position on immigration, which is that some immigrant groups are a net positive and others a net negative, increasing disorder and not successfully becoming productive. I/o specifically points to Muslim immigration in Europe as an example of an “open borders” style policy that has gone poorly for host countries. I think Bryan addresses this concern by saying that host countries should simply not extend benefits and ??? For the disorder. It’s not a convincing response and doesn’t seem thought through. A debate on X would be interesting.
It sounds sophisticated but it boils down to "when there is a common interest that people’s individual actions don’t necessarily maximize, I think that there is a role for the government is to make good “trades” to maximize this common interest (and not make the bad trades)"
Much of the case for open borders by Bryan is questioning that the government should make these choices, both from a moral and and economic efficiency perspective
That doesn't mean nobody makes these choices (e.g. adverse selection decisions are done by private organisations, businesses, landlords, individuals).
Where Bryan's case is challenging is when people don't see past the premise above of "government should organise common interest" (at which level of government? size? and people just assume it's the nation state or the US federal government).
He's trying to give people good reasons that makes it fit into their way of thinking, but that's eventually where people find inconsistencies or aren't able to grasp with the full idea.
Do you intend to reply to Ryan McMaken's article "Haiti: Why Open Borders Don’t Work in the Developing World"? Maybe in the future, I reply to this article.
Talking about immigration, I am doing some research about German immigration to Brazil, since I am a German Brazilian. My great-great-grandfather came during the 1820s to fight in the Cisplatine War as Dom Pedro I mercenary.
Merry Christmas!
This is a great demonstration of why the moral argument has to be primary. The bottom line is that human beings should be free to identify and pursue their rational values and achieve their best life in the place where they're most able to do that by their own judgment. What that means for any country's economy is secondary, although the fact is that the more productive people a country attracts, the better off it'll be.
To paraphrase Milton Friedman: though an open-borders immigration policy may prove advantageous for a host country's current inhabitants if immigrants must fend for themselves, accepting all comers when substantial benefits are available to them at public expense is a very different kettle of fish.
For details, see https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/sorry-but-illegal-aliens-cost-the-u-s-plenty/ and the graph captioned Figure 2.1 in this blog post: https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/somalis-in-the-usa-also-not-a-success
This is a good point but it’s not adverse selection, it is simply that the current marginal high skill immigrant is net good whereas if we expanded immigration a lot then the counterfactual marginal immigrant would be substantially different and probably substantially worse. It is not that the worst people choose to immigrate (at least legally) but that actually the best do currently but that would change if we moved the margin. The implication being that we should cautiously permit more high skill immigration but stop before the point where we are legally allowing the sorts that are currently asylum seekers (which obviously should be halted).
I’m not sure how to interpret “adverse selection” in this circumstance.
Does it mean some immigrants would not experience increased wages and increase production? Or does it mean some immigrants are criminals who would increase their own wages but have a net negative effect on production?
The first seems unlikely, unless you buy into the idea that immigrants go on welfare to a large extent (or perhaps more of them would under more relaxed restrictions). No matter how low your wage is in the US, if you have a job, it pays better than the corresponding job in Haiti. So the question boils down to, will they be employed?
The second seems unlikely, as criminals would seem less likely to be discouraged by legal restrictions on immigration. Gangsters don’t need to wait for better legal immigration policies, since breaking the law is kind of their thing.
Is there some other interpretation that I am missing?
One interpretation that obviously fails is that increased immigration has negative effects on current residents. If this is true, it seems unlikely that there is the sort of asymmetric information that leads to adverse selection.
His point about Ukraine is relevant to how "asylum" laws apply to "refugees" today. It's not longer required that the country be a warzone, instead merely having lots of crime/homicide suffices, as does being unable to manage natural disasters.
The "typical person" is irrelevant to questions of justice and honor, because the point of structuring social relationships according to such virtues is to regulate the behavior of the specific individuals one is interacting with. To the extent that a state is engaged in protecting the rights of people residing within its territory, then a given instance of border-crossing by a non-resident has to be judged in the context of whether or not their entry into the country contributes to a violation of the rights of its residents. Crossing a border may be one step the process of initiating a harm, so pre-empting a series of harmful actions before the harm is fully manifested by stopping someone at the border is justified as a defensive act on behalf of the residents.
On the other hand, the ruling class of a state is usually interested in exploiting their resident subjects, and perhaps in using immigrants as a means of furthering such exploitation. Immigration means something quite different in a classical liberal state versus a state characterized by welfarism, interventionism, and imperialism. In the latter case, many residents may well view immigrants as competitors for state-created privileges, immunities, and subsidies; as harboring potentially violent resentments against the native-born due to their prior experiences with imperialist aggression; and as political allies of ruling class groups that seek to intensify the burdens of statism on the native-born.
The advocacy of open borders has to be coupled to an advocacy of rolling back these other aspects of statism. To the extent that the existence of various harms are correlated to immigrants, one must change the terms of the debate to address the actual causes of these harms rather than blaming immigration.
I find it commendable that Bryan goes out of his way to share high quality rebuttals to his arguments with his audience.
Interesting post. Really leverages the “past performance does not guarantee future results”.
I think the Mariel Boatlift is the best real-life example of adverse selection in immigration. The immigrants in that event were not self-selected, but selected by a hostile dictator.
Wow - quite the sophisticated analysis by Khale (probably a talented Quant)! There are many reasonable objections to unlimited mass immigration - just look at what is happening across the pond in the UK where exponential increases in non-European immigrants have had a negative fiscal impact and created enormous amounts of cultural conflict. However, many favor immigration provided that it is subject to reasonable constraints such as skill requirements. I personally favor a requirement for formal invitation from citizens or companies willing to assume liability for any taxpayer or criminal expenses incurred.