I debate immigration habitually. Whenever there’s before-and-after voting, I always lose. No matter how leftist the audience is, the anti-immigration side need only warn “Immigration could hurt some Americans” to flip the vote. Further proof that almost everyone is a nationalist at heart.
Happily, however, my recent Steamboat Institute debate against Sohrab Ahmari broke my long-running immigration debate losing streak. The simplest explanation: The resolution was heavily stacked in my favor — but most attendees didn’t notice until the debate was underway.
Normally, the topic under discussion is something like, “Would open borders be good for America?” This time, however, the resolution (set by Steamboat, not me) was:
Does open borders benefit humanity by reducing poverty and boosting the economy?
…which made my job easy indeed.
Throughout the debate, I emphasized the undisputed massive benefits for immigrants and their families — most notably, earning 5x, 10x, or even 15x as much abroad as they could have earned at home. Ahmari never challenged this debate-settling fact. Instead, he presented the standard Americentric complaints about immigration. When I reminded him that these harms to Americans, even if true, were rounding errors compared to the gains to non-Americans, he vaguely claimed that “benefit to humanity” is a meaningless phrase.
In my closing statement, I ridiculed Ahmari’s evasive position. Is it really “meaningless” to claim that “World peace would benefit humanity” or “Vaccines benefit humanity”? Then how can it be meaningless to claim that “Open borders benefit humanity”?
Further thoughts:
After seeing the incredible economic power of mass migration in the United Arab Emirates, I decided to work my experiences into my talk. Tyler Cowen warned me that this was strategically foolish, but I kept my own counsel — and I’m very glad I did. Not only did I win the post-debate vote. The UAE really is the world’s strongest visible proof that the First World is ignoring an awesome missed opportunity. Credit where credit is due, people.
Ahmari attacked UAE’s immigration policies as “serfdom” and even “slavery.” To fully appreciate the topsy-turvy absurdity of his accusations, note that under serfdom and slavery, workers want to escape. But low-skilled workers around the world are eager to enter the UAE’s labor market.
Ahmari made many lurid claims about the horrible treatment that foreign workers endure in the UAE. Employer passport withholding, the most infamous, is now illegal in the UAE, and locals tell me that the law is strictly enforced. Regardless of UAE law, however, what really matters is that — thanks to cellphones and the internet — virtually every worker who comes to the UAE correctly expects to have a much better life in the UAE than they have at home.
Yes, I know that even the UAE doesn’t have fully open borders. But if the U.S. allowed it’s foreign-born share to rise until it matched UAE’s, we’d admit an additional 2.4 billion foreigners. Which really would be tantamount to open borders.
Ahmari repeatedly twisted my targeted praise of UAE’s immigration policies into a general praise of all UAE policies. If he’d been more strategic, he would have posed pointed questions instead of willfully mishearing me. For example, he could have probed, “If the only way to get open borders was to put power into the hands of a Sheikh Zayed, should we do so?” To which I would have candidly replied, “Probably.”
At one point, Ahmari referred to UAE as a “tyranny.” Perhaps his standards are so high that practically every government is a tyranny, but I doubt it. He never condemned India, though I mentioned its grotesque shortcomings multiple times. So why didn’t he? Because India is a “democracy” that traps its people in poverty, instead of a monarchy that enriches natives and foreigners alike?
Ahmari offered one on-point criticism: that open borders is “utopian.” In other words, a pile of feel-good wishful thinking that would in practice harm humanity. But not only did he fail to flesh out this criticism; the real-world experience of the UAE shows open borders works well when tried. One initially unpromising country has used mass migration to produced stunning prosperity; therefore, more functional countries are fully capable of mimicking its success.
“Utopian.” It would have made a lot more sense for Ahmari to claim that open borders is dystopian rather than utopian. (Though he did briefly mention Blade Runner!) My reply: Open borders would only look “dystopian” to someone who was oblivious to the desperate poverty that billions of humans on Earth still endure. Once you witness how most people live in India, how can you condemn a society as “dystopian” for allowing the global poor to swiftly work their way out of poverty?
Here’s full debate video.
For example, he could have probed, “If the only way to get open borders was to put power into the hands of a Sheikh Zayed, should we do so?” To which I would have candidly replied, “Probably.”
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In the other thread people scoffed when I said that you advocated dictatorship, but I noted that you've advocated for it several times before. Here we are again.
So basically it all comes down to this. You are willing to risk the downsides of dictatorship, in fact dictatorship of a very small group over a very large group they have nothing in common with and under massive inequality, and inherently unstable affair, in order to implement Open Borders.
You know the downsides of dictatorship. For every UAE there are plenty of Maos and the like. Even dictatorships that go well at first often degenerate or collapse later.
I have no clue what your implementation plan is to bring about a UAE style dictatorship in America. How do you plan to get the necessary constitutional amendments passed? What political constituency do you plan to call upon to bring about and maintain these changes?
Are there any differences between the dictatorship in context of the UAE and dictatorship as would have to be practice by large western democracies? Is it inherently easier to run a dictatorship being a city state sitting on a pile of oil in the desert and not needing to unlock any of the productive potential of its citizens because it can just buy such things from abroad?
Why would we give much regard as to the suffering of the Indians in India? Let them suffer, I say. It be none of our business. Our business should be solely that of our own happiness, and how much value we can extract from immigrant workers.
And in the case of America, there is no need to resort to Indians as migrant workers. You can easily import them from China or South-East Asia. There is a vast labour pool aboard in Asia, without needing to draw from India and Pakistan.