Is Caplan is aware of the situation in the UK? Ignoring the cultural impact such as the thousands of victims of rape gangs, what has been the net fiscal impact of non EU immigration?
Indeed. Sure, they’ve had a quarter of a million girls gang-raped as a result, but look at the economic benefits . . . <Notices UK GDP per capita has been flat or declining since 2007> . . . Ah, well, nevertheless . . .
That’s the thing with Caplan, he never lets empirical reality get in the way of a good theory. If he hadn’t stumbled into the Ayn Rand cult he would have been a good communist.
And this “libertarian”’s vision of an ideal society, U.A.E., is a hereditary monarchy with a police state.
Caplan is a fundamentally unserious person who should stick to writing comic books like Ta Nahesi Coates.
I'm somewhat skeptical about the economic benefits, since to my knowledge the impact of immigration is close to zero. But it's not right to point to the UK as evidence to the contrary. What matters is whether GDP per capita would have been higher or even lower with less immigration, which is not so obvious. They might have been worse off.
While this is strictly true, history and economics never provide perfectly controlled experiments and there's always a possible alternative explanation.
But unrestricted immigration advocates like Bryan Caplan have claimed that the economic benefits are SO MASSIVE and IMMEDIATE that they justify accepting much higher crime rates, lower social trust and cohesion and total destruction of local cultures that have existed for centuries. So when we run their proposed experiment and find that there's NO evidence of this supposedly enormous effect, and in fact it seems to run in the other direction, then THEY have failed to meet the burden of proof and we cannot reject the null.
In practice, of course, many will attempt to come up with increasingly convoluted explanations (epicycles within epicycles!) for why there was, e.g., a simultaneous economic tailwind which just happened to exactly balance out the positive effect we would otherwise see. And just like the apologists for why communist countries sucked, the answer is usually "REAL open borders has never been tried" (again, the libertarian and communist utopian mentalities are mirror images of each other and attract the exact same personality types).
In Bryan's case, though, he bypasses all that and simply ignores the mountains of contradictory evidence, which, in a certain way, is less dishonest, I suppose. That's why I say he never lets messy empirical reality get in the way of his pure back-of-the-napkin models.
“We natives are so smart, our heritage so refined, our trust so deep”
Hmm. My country of Singapore does in fact do this. We gush over how wonderful we are, how wealthy, how intelligent, how educated, how superior beings we are. But we nonetheless welcome immigrants to perform both low-skill and high-skill work in our country, because we can extract economic value out of them.
We literally impose an explicit tax on low-skill workers for the wonderful privilege of working in Singapore. Since only a finite number of them can work in Singapore given the physical constraints of the infrastructure, this tax allows us to extract even more value than the producer surplus alone.
“What fraction of humans are better than nothing?”
I'd put the cutoff somewhere around 85 IQ. People below 85 IQ obviously negative (I think Mcnamara's Morons were below 83 IQ). That would mean about 16% of white society is useless. But if I were to talk about blacks or other low IQ groups it would be 50%+.
Of course I can think of context where the figure would be higher than 85 IQ. For instance, if the numbers involved are low and they are politically inert there is less risk. If the numbers are large and they are politically damaging, it probably trends towards the higher end. For instance, a black person with a 90 IQ is far more damaging than a white person with a 90 IQ, especially if your city has a large black population and is at risk becoming black run.
There is also the question of "how much worse than nothing". Even if I could prove someone was say a net fiscal drain, are they so much of a drain to be worth deporting? Deporting people has externalities too.
This is by the way one of the reasons people talk about preventing immigrants versus emigrating natives. It's just easier to do. Obviously, I would trade a native black person for a Mexican if I could. But blacks are voters and Mexican immigrants are not. It's way easier to keep Mexicans out then kick blacks out.
I think what you have is just a lot of preference falsification in order to build domestic political coalitions. If someone says something that seems to differ from their actions or is inconsistent with others things they say, perhaps their actions are restrained by politics.
As to high end immigration, I think the evidence has changed a lot over the last few decades. Back in the 1990s I used to think "high skill" immigration (primarily from Asia) was the best thing ever. But Asias had a bad few decades. Growth collapsed amongst the Asian Tigers. Fertility rates plunged. Innovation rates greatly lagged per capita IQ. When the evidence changes, you have to change your views.
We also saw three big Anglo countries (Canada, UK, Australia) go big on importing infinite "skilled" Indians. It appears to have been a massive failure. The recent H1B debate in America certainly hardened my view that more Indians would be bad for America. Vivek's vision of what America should be is just really bad.
I've come around to the idea that there are things beyond raw IQ that are important for dynamic and successful societies. I don't mean this in the way IQ denialists mean. I mean that IQ is necessary but not sufficient. These non-IQ items may also be partly genetic in nature, just harder to measure and explain.
See my comment to Tucker O. right above. When it comes to various low-skilled jobs, an extremely high-IQ society can sometimes or even often build robots to do these jobs instead of relying on extremely smart humans to personally do these jobs.
1. So you’re unable to respond to the 3 arguments I made against immigration on instagram?
2. To not “deny the obvious facts of human inequality” entails rejecting colorblindness because colorblindness goes against the obvious facts of racial human inequality and human nature.
3. It has nothing to do with misanthropy that’s complete b.s. because the same anti immigrants would tell you things were way better before mass immigration and the immigrants’ descendants and nonwhites are one of the reasons for the worsened native born statistics which is objectively true.
You’re the economist and I’m not. On GDP growth and the overall economic benefits of immigration, I’m in no position to question the points you make.
I do wonder, however, about the qualitative effects on the “fabric of society”, esp with “open borders” and (if I understand you correctly) wide open immigration.
I’m for skilled immigration to fulfill the needs of the host society. I’m also for explicit requirements for immigrants to demonstrate integration into the host society. I want immigrants (I’m Canadian) who are looking to become “Canadians”, and not hyphenated-Canadians. I’m for the old school melting pot, and not for silos where immigrants just end up in “little-version-of-the-place-they-came-from”. And I definitely do not want the UK version of immigrant grooming gangs.
What's a "Canadian"? Once we have an answer to that, we can work on sending you suitable candidates for the position. In the old days, it used to be "just not American." Not sure about today...
So, let's parse that a bit. Here's a FICTIONAL news headline that could well appear in any Canadian city at any time. "A Canadian man killed his 19 year-old daughter today, claiming she had dishonored the family by dating someone outside her religion."
No. “Honour killling” is very much NOT part of Canadian value system. That is very much a dude who has NOT integrated into Canadian culture, and still very much living his hyphenated life. No thanks, if it were up to me
Dude, Canadians (here defined as people who live there) have had an identity crisis ever since 1867. When I lived there, the first question every Canadian asked every other one they met was: "What's your nationality?" In case you've never thought about it, that's because there's no such nationality as "Canadian"—it's simply and only a place you live. That's my point.
This feels disingenuous. Here's one hypothesis: people value social trust. Social trust is highly correlated with subjective wellbeing, and typically negatively affected by immigration. Social trust is enhanced by having limited migration and cultural homogeny. It means that people are better able to anticipate how others will react, that people find it easier to understand and follow social norms. People develop deeper reciprocal relationships and a cohesive broader identity that facilitates more cooperation among individuals and at a national level. Migration (whether within or between borders) erodes this social fabric. It is perfectly reasonable for people to place high value of this (higher even than economic output). Not to say that there aren't strong arguments in favour of increased migration, but to reduce any anti-immigration stance to misanthropy is a strawman argument.
The question you asked is "Why then do so few anti-immigrants voice support policies that discourage fertility for the average citizen?"
But assuming your theory is correct, the better question to ponder is this. "Why are anti-immigrant misanthropes the dominant group seeking higher fertility rates?" In your framing, they could at least not advocate for increased fertility.
You are so gifted in argument framing and this is an outstanding piece. I would ask, however, that you would address the issue of net elite gain vs net working class pain. Yes, immigration driven productivity gains “trickle down” in some form as a point of fact. But would you not agree that at certain higher levels, native elites benefit where native workers are harmed - or at the very least, the working class deserved a curated score vs “net”?
Caplan gave the game away with his focus on GWP (Gross WORLD Product). Very simple(minded) thinking: GWP going up is good for everyone, on average (as he would say). Therefore, unlimited immigration is a a world good.
Yeah, right. What could possibly go wrong? I'm fond of suggesting to these highly educated idiots that they endeavor to make it (whatever fantasy "it" entails) work FIRST in Haiti before inducing the globe's premier economies to "experiment" with "its" adoption. AFTER the raging success they achieve in Haiti, the rest of the world will be happy to join in. Until then, however,...
How's that working out in Ohio? Just think of the culinary opportunities we're all missing. So the people who've been suffering under Haitian "culture" for better than two centuries would make our lame culture better somehow. Hmm. Oh, and Detroit's had over 100 years to get its shit together after the first Great Migration (of Americans!). 'Course it could happen any year now...
The same folks who made the deal with the employment agency to bring in the Haitians in the first place? And they say things are just great? Whoda thunk, huh?
And what of all those townspeople complaining about French-speakers everywhere around town clogging up all the stores and services? The ones crashing cars left and right and running red lights and causing havoc? Just a little diversity to liven things up...you know how boring life in small-town Ohio can be...
One answer is staring in the face but goes unmentioned. Love of one's country and its inherited culture and unwillingness to let it submerged in face of potential flows of hundreds of millions of immigrants, from cultures not one's own.
The only segments of the population supporting “open the floodgate” unlimited immigration are the far-fringe libertarians, and the neoracist (anti-colorblind?) woke. I won’t even try to psychoanalyze their motivations, though I suspect both mean well.
Personally I am a big fan of robust levels of legal immigration. Unfortunately, current political realities seem to interfere with our ability to actually design any realistic immigration system worth adopting.
I would open the bidding for immigrants at $1M per person, with requirements that they also speak fluent English and pay for a certified background check. The revenue goes to Social Security. Once here they pay double or triple the rate for SS and Medicare. If we need more immigrants than we can get at this rate, I would lower the bid to a level we are comfortable with (it could even differ by state with a few caveats). The fee could be paid by an employer.
Anyone committing a crime or requiring welfare or government funded/subsidized health care would forfeit their deposit and be sent back home.
If this is too much for people, I would suggest creating a new walled charter city with open borders. The libertarians can help us design it. I hear there is some prime real estate opening up in Gaza.
I favor that, so I guess that excludes me from the anti-immigrant designation, alongside Garett Jones.
> Why do so few support policies encouraging the emigration of subpar natives?
What policies have been proposed for anyone to support or oppose?
> Everyone who works generates lots of consumer surplus even if their net fiscal contribution to the Treasury is negative.
No, some jobs are worse than nothing. Since you're an anarchist, that would include a lot of government jobs restricting people's freedom. Even people outside the government who work as political activists for bad causes are at best ineffective, and at worst effective at making things worse.
I thought the USA, under Trump, is first in line to get masses of white South Africans looking to flee the RSA (now that Australia, England, and the Netherlands have had their fill of them and decided to move on to more, um, diverse and vibrant newcomers). From what I hear, the South Africans we'd be getting are definitely in the give-more-than-they-take category. So open the gates, Bryan?
Is Caplan is aware of the situation in the UK? Ignoring the cultural impact such as the thousands of victims of rape gangs, what has been the net fiscal impact of non EU immigration?
Indeed. Sure, they’ve had a quarter of a million girls gang-raped as a result, but look at the economic benefits . . . <Notices UK GDP per capita has been flat or declining since 2007> . . . Ah, well, nevertheless . . .
That’s the thing with Caplan, he never lets empirical reality get in the way of a good theory. If he hadn’t stumbled into the Ayn Rand cult he would have been a good communist.
And this “libertarian”’s vision of an ideal society, U.A.E., is a hereditary monarchy with a police state.
Caplan is a fundamentally unserious person who should stick to writing comic books like Ta Nahesi Coates.
I'm somewhat skeptical about the economic benefits, since to my knowledge the impact of immigration is close to zero. But it's not right to point to the UK as evidence to the contrary. What matters is whether GDP per capita would have been higher or even lower with less immigration, which is not so obvious. They might have been worse off.
While this is strictly true, history and economics never provide perfectly controlled experiments and there's always a possible alternative explanation.
But unrestricted immigration advocates like Bryan Caplan have claimed that the economic benefits are SO MASSIVE and IMMEDIATE that they justify accepting much higher crime rates, lower social trust and cohesion and total destruction of local cultures that have existed for centuries. So when we run their proposed experiment and find that there's NO evidence of this supposedly enormous effect, and in fact it seems to run in the other direction, then THEY have failed to meet the burden of proof and we cannot reject the null.
In practice, of course, many will attempt to come up with increasingly convoluted explanations (epicycles within epicycles!) for why there was, e.g., a simultaneous economic tailwind which just happened to exactly balance out the positive effect we would otherwise see. And just like the apologists for why communist countries sucked, the answer is usually "REAL open borders has never been tried" (again, the libertarian and communist utopian mentalities are mirror images of each other and attract the exact same personality types).
In Bryan's case, though, he bypasses all that and simply ignores the mountains of contradictory evidence, which, in a certain way, is less dishonest, I suppose. That's why I say he never lets messy empirical reality get in the way of his pure back-of-the-napkin models.
This is not an ideological problem.
Some cultures are simply incompatible with the west. White genocide is not only white:
https://rayhorvaththesource.substack.com/p/the-white-genocide-is-not-only-white
There are serious problems even with legal immigration:
https://rayhorvaththesource.substack.com/p/government-savings-and-illegals
Same people who oppose immigration generally support higher fertility within the country (ie Victor Orban or even Musk in some sense).
Hence it is not misanthropy.
Clear and simple, it’s about heritage (among other things) not misanthropy, that is a complete distortion and strawman of our position.
From the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States:
"...and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity..."
"our Posterity" = all OUR (We the People's) future descendants
“We natives are so smart, our heritage so refined, our trust so deep”
Hmm. My country of Singapore does in fact do this. We gush over how wonderful we are, how wealthy, how intelligent, how educated, how superior beings we are. But we nonetheless welcome immigrants to perform both low-skill and high-skill work in our country, because we can extract economic value out of them.
We literally impose an explicit tax on low-skill workers for the wonderful privilege of working in Singapore. Since only a finite number of them can work in Singapore given the physical constraints of the infrastructure, this tax allows us to extract even more value than the producer surplus alone.
“What fraction of humans are better than nothing?”
I'd put the cutoff somewhere around 85 IQ. People below 85 IQ obviously negative (I think Mcnamara's Morons were below 83 IQ). That would mean about 16% of white society is useless. But if I were to talk about blacks or other low IQ groups it would be 50%+.
Of course I can think of context where the figure would be higher than 85 IQ. For instance, if the numbers involved are low and they are politically inert there is less risk. If the numbers are large and they are politically damaging, it probably trends towards the higher end. For instance, a black person with a 90 IQ is far more damaging than a white person with a 90 IQ, especially if your city has a large black population and is at risk becoming black run.
There is also the question of "how much worse than nothing". Even if I could prove someone was say a net fiscal drain, are they so much of a drain to be worth deporting? Deporting people has externalities too.
This is by the way one of the reasons people talk about preventing immigrants versus emigrating natives. It's just easier to do. Obviously, I would trade a native black person for a Mexican if I could. But blacks are voters and Mexican immigrants are not. It's way easier to keep Mexicans out then kick blacks out.
I think what you have is just a lot of preference falsification in order to build domestic political coalitions. If someone says something that seems to differ from their actions or is inconsistent with others things they say, perhaps their actions are restrained by politics.
As to high end immigration, I think the evidence has changed a lot over the last few decades. Back in the 1990s I used to think "high skill" immigration (primarily from Asia) was the best thing ever. But Asias had a bad few decades. Growth collapsed amongst the Asian Tigers. Fertility rates plunged. Innovation rates greatly lagged per capita IQ. When the evidence changes, you have to change your views.
We also saw three big Anglo countries (Canada, UK, Australia) go big on importing infinite "skilled" Indians. It appears to have been a massive failure. The recent H1B debate in America certainly hardened my view that more Indians would be bad for America. Vivek's vision of what America should be is just really bad.
I've come around to the idea that there are things beyond raw IQ that are important for dynamic and successful societies. I don't mean this in the way IQ denialists mean. I mean that IQ is necessary but not sufficient. These non-IQ items may also be partly genetic in nature, just harder to measure and explain.
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2010/09/against_high-iq.html
"In a society of Einsteins, Einsteins take out the garbage, scrub floors, and wash dishes. What a mind-numbing waste of talent!"
Or Einsteins design and build robots to achieve this goal so that they themselves don't have to do this!
Yeah I've read it and didn't find it compelling.
See my comment to Tucker O. right above. When it comes to various low-skilled jobs, an extremely high-IQ society can sometimes or even often build robots to do these jobs instead of relying on extremely smart humans to personally do these jobs.
1. So you’re unable to respond to the 3 arguments I made against immigration on instagram?
2. To not “deny the obvious facts of human inequality” entails rejecting colorblindness because colorblindness goes against the obvious facts of racial human inequality and human nature.
3. It has nothing to do with misanthropy that’s complete b.s. because the same anti immigrants would tell you things were way better before mass immigration and the immigrants’ descendants and nonwhites are one of the reasons for the worsened native born statistics which is objectively true.
You’re the economist and I’m not. On GDP growth and the overall economic benefits of immigration, I’m in no position to question the points you make.
I do wonder, however, about the qualitative effects on the “fabric of society”, esp with “open borders” and (if I understand you correctly) wide open immigration.
I’m for skilled immigration to fulfill the needs of the host society. I’m also for explicit requirements for immigrants to demonstrate integration into the host society. I want immigrants (I’m Canadian) who are looking to become “Canadians”, and not hyphenated-Canadians. I’m for the old school melting pot, and not for silos where immigrants just end up in “little-version-of-the-place-they-came-from”. And I definitely do not want the UK version of immigrant grooming gangs.
What's a "Canadian"? Once we have an answer to that, we can work on sending you suitable candidates for the position. In the old days, it used to be "just not American." Not sure about today...
Same as “American”….in the sense of just a citizen of a country.
So, let's parse that a bit. Here's a FICTIONAL news headline that could well appear in any Canadian city at any time. "A Canadian man killed his 19 year-old daughter today, claiming she had dishonored the family by dating someone outside her religion."
So, "just a citizen of...Canada"?
No. “Honour killling” is very much NOT part of Canadian value system. That is very much a dude who has NOT integrated into Canadian culture, and still very much living his hyphenated life. No thanks, if it were up to me
Now you're catching on. It takes Canadians a little longer than most folks—the niceness thing, eh?
Well next time just ask an actual question instead of the silly rando “what’s a Canadian”.
Dude, Canadians (here defined as people who live there) have had an identity crisis ever since 1867. When I lived there, the first question every Canadian asked every other one they met was: "What's your nationality?" In case you've never thought about it, that's because there's no such nationality as "Canadian"—it's simply and only a place you live. That's my point.
This feels disingenuous. Here's one hypothesis: people value social trust. Social trust is highly correlated with subjective wellbeing, and typically negatively affected by immigration. Social trust is enhanced by having limited migration and cultural homogeny. It means that people are better able to anticipate how others will react, that people find it easier to understand and follow social norms. People develop deeper reciprocal relationships and a cohesive broader identity that facilitates more cooperation among individuals and at a national level. Migration (whether within or between borders) erodes this social fabric. It is perfectly reasonable for people to place high value of this (higher even than economic output). Not to say that there aren't strong arguments in favour of increased migration, but to reduce any anti-immigration stance to misanthropy is a strawman argument.
The question you asked is "Why then do so few anti-immigrants voice support policies that discourage fertility for the average citizen?"
But assuming your theory is correct, the better question to ponder is this. "Why are anti-immigrant misanthropes the dominant group seeking higher fertility rates?" In your framing, they could at least not advocate for increased fertility.
Bryan,
You are so gifted in argument framing and this is an outstanding piece. I would ask, however, that you would address the issue of net elite gain vs net working class pain. Yes, immigration driven productivity gains “trickle down” in some form as a point of fact. But would you not agree that at certain higher levels, native elites benefit where native workers are harmed - or at the very least, the working class deserved a curated score vs “net”?
You might be too high up on your ivory tower to be able to understand the real world consequences of immigration.
Caplan gave the game away with his focus on GWP (Gross WORLD Product). Very simple(minded) thinking: GWP going up is good for everyone, on average (as he would say). Therefore, unlimited immigration is a a world good.
Yeah, right. What could possibly go wrong? I'm fond of suggesting to these highly educated idiots that they endeavor to make it (whatever fantasy "it" entails) work FIRST in Haiti before inducing the globe's premier economies to "experiment" with "its" adoption. AFTER the raging success they achieve in Haiti, the rest of the world will be happy to join in. Until then, however,...
If Haitians moved to the US, they would quickly adopt US culture. We would be better off and so would they.
How's that working out in Ohio? Just think of the culinary opportunities we're all missing. So the people who've been suffering under Haitian "culture" for better than two centuries would make our lame culture better somehow. Hmm. Oh, and Detroit's had over 100 years to get its shit together after the first Great Migration (of Americans!). 'Course it could happen any year now...
I don’t know. But the Mayor and City Manager seem to think it’s not too bad. Doom has not befallen the city of Springfield.
https://www.springfieldnewssun.com/news/springfields-mayor-manager-offer-state-of-the-city/VSYMTC5P25BIVCNYPIJUJCVGXQ/
The same folks who made the deal with the employment agency to bring in the Haitians in the first place? And they say things are just great? Whoda thunk, huh?
And what of all those townspeople complaining about French-speakers everywhere around town clogging up all the stores and services? The ones crashing cars left and right and running red lights and causing havoc? Just a little diversity to liven things up...you know how boring life in small-town Ohio can be...
One answer is staring in the face but goes unmentioned. Love of one's country and its inherited culture and unwillingness to let it submerged in face of potential flows of hundreds of millions of immigrants, from cultures not one's own.
The only segments of the population supporting “open the floodgate” unlimited immigration are the far-fringe libertarians, and the neoracist (anti-colorblind?) woke. I won’t even try to psychoanalyze their motivations, though I suspect both mean well.
Personally I am a big fan of robust levels of legal immigration. Unfortunately, current political realities seem to interfere with our ability to actually design any realistic immigration system worth adopting.
I would open the bidding for immigrants at $1M per person, with requirements that they also speak fluent English and pay for a certified background check. The revenue goes to Social Security. Once here they pay double or triple the rate for SS and Medicare. If we need more immigrants than we can get at this rate, I would lower the bid to a level we are comfortable with (it could even differ by state with a few caveats). The fee could be paid by an employer.
Anyone committing a crime or requiring welfare or government funded/subsidized health care would forfeit their deposit and be sent back home.
If this is too much for people, I would suggest creating a new walled charter city with open borders. The libertarians can help us design it. I hear there is some prime real estate opening up in Gaza.
> Yet if a native commits the same action, the same people would laugh at the idea that, “We’ve got to do something about natives.”
What would you do? You can't deport them now that Australia is no longer a prison colony.
> Near-zero anti-immigrants advocate 10xing high-skilled immigration.
I favor that, so I guess that excludes me from the anti-immigrant designation, alongside Garett Jones.
> Why do so few support policies encouraging the emigration of subpar natives?
What policies have been proposed for anyone to support or oppose?
> Everyone who works generates lots of consumer surplus even if their net fiscal contribution to the Treasury is negative.
No, some jobs are worse than nothing. Since you're an anarchist, that would include a lot of government jobs restricting people's freedom. Even people outside the government who work as political activists for bad causes are at best ineffective, and at worst effective at making things worse.
Shouldn't the slogan form be "what fraction of humans are worse than nothing"?
I thought the USA, under Trump, is first in line to get masses of white South Africans looking to flee the RSA (now that Australia, England, and the Netherlands have had their fill of them and decided to move on to more, um, diverse and vibrant newcomers). From what I hear, the South Africans we'd be getting are definitely in the give-more-than-they-take category. So open the gates, Bryan?