UAE and Utopia

Reflections on my immigration debate with Sohrab Ahmari

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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

   

   “Dystopian” Blade Runner still looks a lot better than India.

5. 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.”

6. 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?

7. 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.

8. “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.