Immigration road map should be, who is going to help us and contribute to us continuing to be the greatest country in the world. No use for letting criminals and terrorists in.
Bryan, perhaps you have seen the headlines about certain states offering housing benefits to immigrants that are not offered to citizens. What do you make of this? Is this policy affordable? I actually understand California's plan is not funded! What are citizens supposed to make of these policies?
It is absolutely common sense that you cannot have open immigration with government picking and choosing winner and losers and handing out benefits not earned by the immigrant, let alone by the citizenry. No nation can afford such a policy. And politically, policy that pits citizen against immigrant will lead to massive unrest and conflict.
Some of your readers, including myself, would appreciate you argued immigration policy (including the handling of illegal immigration) with respect to how policy actually exists in the US and Western Europe. Are those immigration policies working? Clearly, we are seeing tremendous government interference. Are you willing to concede that this government interference makes the Libertarian argument for immigration a hypothetical that does not exist in reality? Or do you believe there is some magic that will cause government to stop interfering?
My government is using non-citizens to make citizens less privileged in their own country. Sure, I don't need to be angry at non-citizens. But any solution, if there is one, requires this preference to stop.
Also, one should ask, is the comparison of non-citizen to citizen done by comparing the non-citizen to the bottom 10% of citizens or to the top 10% of citizens? If the comparison is to the lower percentile then doesn't that invite more poverty into the country? Why would any sane nation import poverty? It makes sense to treat non-citizens as if they were in the top half of citizens. This means non-citizens who come into the country are assumed to be above average. And if they can't make the grade - if they require public assistance - then they can return home.
I would argue against birthright citizenship in the US. Sure, if you born in the US you can stay as a permanent resident (as I have permanent residency in Panamá), but not vote. I would suggest one needs to acquire some specific knowledge and theory about their country to execute the critical lever of control over government, at a minimum pass the US citizens test given to legal immigrants as was to my two sons-in-law (now citizens, I think one votes Republican and one Democrat.) The Republican is now a bank manager and came from deep poverty in Panamá, the Dem was prey middle class... Says something...
There are hundreds of millions of people in the world who would experience a dramatic improvement in THEIR quality of life if they found themselves in the United States. Would their personal gain translate to a benefit to or impose a cost on the current residents of the United States?
What jobs will these people have? How much will those jobs pay?
You take people making $10 a day in their nation and bring them to the USA where the median income is on the order of $120 a day. Do the immigrants automagically generate $120 a day of value? Why? Why would the value of a person's labor increase more than 10 fold simply by changing where the person lives?
In his speech, Friedman repeatedly mentions that everyone is better off (e.g. with illegal Mexican immigration), but then doesn't list the non-emigrants who stay in their home country. Is there an obvious argument for why they also are better off in the short run and/or in the long run?
Naive negative effects that come to mind are brain drain and loss of taxes. Positive effects are tickle down effects due to family support, innovation diffusion and political pressure to also become a better state in the long run.
"When critics of open immigration tell me that these newcomers will bankrupt the state welfare systems, I am not sent into a state of despair. When they also tell me that the public schools could not stand the pressure, I am also not sent into despair. At zero price, there is greater demand than supply. The larger the demand, the faster the bankruptcy. If voters begin to perceive that immigrants are not morally entitled to the welfare state’s entitlement programs, I can only concur. It then becomes easier to make my point: no one else is entitled to them, either."
What's the Libertarian, open borders solution when countries send their prison gangs to America?
"Tren de Aragua, a prison gang hailing from the Aragua region of Venezuela, has been sending its members across the US-Mexico border for years while also recruiting within the US among migrant communities, mainly in New York, Denver and Chicago."
We don't have to overcomplicate our response to Friedman's argument. Yes, it's true that increasing the population of welfare state beneficiaries is a bad thing, and that open borders contributes to such an increase. However, welfare statism attracts the native-born into the ranks of beneficiaries too, so you can't prevent the harms associated with welfarism by halting immigration. The only cure is to get rid of Social Security, Medicare, etc. and to get rid of the fiat dollar system that incentivizes politicians to increase their spendthrift behavior without any serious fiscal constraint.
Part of the problem with Friedman, and with most mainstream economists for that matter, is that they don't focus on (or in many cases, understand) the economic benefits of individuals taking personal responsibility for their own future economic security by saving and investing privately. When one attempts to collectivize such responsibility, one runs into the problems that (1) rational cost-benefit calculations for investing are impossible without free market prices driving the allocation of capital goods and inputs (i.e. the socialist calculation problem, codiscovered in 1920 by Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, Russian economist Boris Brutzkus, and German sociologist Max Weber); and (2) without productive investments in capital goods, the time available for transforming labor and natural resource inputs into outputs desired by consumers diminishes, resulting in a loss of factor productivity and real incomes (ideas that were developed in the late 19th century by the Austrian economists Carl Menger and Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk).
In other words, the decline in America's middle class over the past half century hasn't been caused by imports of Chinese goods, by immigrants, or by corporate greed. It has been caused a growth of Social Security and Medicare financed mostly by fiat dollar creation almost entirely (apart from a COVID-related spike) at the expense of net domestic investment ( https://cdn.mises.org/inline-images/image_80.png ).
Immigration road map should be, who is going to help us and contribute to us continuing to be the greatest country in the world. No use for letting criminals and terrorists in.
Bryan, perhaps you have seen the headlines about certain states offering housing benefits to immigrants that are not offered to citizens. What do you make of this? Is this policy affordable? I actually understand California's plan is not funded! What are citizens supposed to make of these policies?
It is absolutely common sense that you cannot have open immigration with government picking and choosing winner and losers and handing out benefits not earned by the immigrant, let alone by the citizenry. No nation can afford such a policy. And politically, policy that pits citizen against immigrant will lead to massive unrest and conflict.
Some of your readers, including myself, would appreciate you argued immigration policy (including the handling of illegal immigration) with respect to how policy actually exists in the US and Western Europe. Are those immigration policies working? Clearly, we are seeing tremendous government interference. Are you willing to concede that this government interference makes the Libertarian argument for immigration a hypothetical that does not exist in reality? Or do you believe there is some magic that will cause government to stop interfering?
The crazy policy does not pit me against some hapless chap from another country, it pits me against my government.
My government is using non-citizens to make citizens less privileged in their own country. Sure, I don't need to be angry at non-citizens. But any solution, if there is one, requires this preference to stop.
Also, one should ask, is the comparison of non-citizen to citizen done by comparing the non-citizen to the bottom 10% of citizens or to the top 10% of citizens? If the comparison is to the lower percentile then doesn't that invite more poverty into the country? Why would any sane nation import poverty? It makes sense to treat non-citizens as if they were in the top half of citizens. This means non-citizens who come into the country are assumed to be above average. And if they can't make the grade - if they require public assistance - then they can return home.
I would argue against birthright citizenship in the US. Sure, if you born in the US you can stay as a permanent resident (as I have permanent residency in Panamá), but not vote. I would suggest one needs to acquire some specific knowledge and theory about their country to execute the critical lever of control over government, at a minimum pass the US citizens test given to legal immigrants as was to my two sons-in-law (now citizens, I think one votes Republican and one Democrat.) The Republican is now a bank manager and came from deep poverty in Panamá, the Dem was prey middle class... Says something...
There are hundreds of millions of people in the world who would experience a dramatic improvement in THEIR quality of life if they found themselves in the United States. Would their personal gain translate to a benefit to or impose a cost on the current residents of the United States?
What does the "mathematics" show?
What jobs will these people have? How much will those jobs pay?
You take people making $10 a day in their nation and bring them to the USA where the median income is on the order of $120 a day. Do the immigrants automagically generate $120 a day of value? Why? Why would the value of a person's labor increase more than 10 fold simply by changing where the person lives?
In his speech, Friedman repeatedly mentions that everyone is better off (e.g. with illegal Mexican immigration), but then doesn't list the non-emigrants who stay in their home country. Is there an obvious argument for why they also are better off in the short run and/or in the long run?
Naive negative effects that come to mind are brain drain and loss of taxes. Positive effects are tickle down effects due to family support, innovation diffusion and political pressure to also become a better state in the long run.
"When critics of open immigration tell me that these newcomers will bankrupt the state welfare systems, I am not sent into a state of despair. When they also tell me that the public schools could not stand the pressure, I am also not sent into despair. At zero price, there is greater demand than supply. The larger the demand, the faster the bankruptcy. If voters begin to perceive that immigrants are not morally entitled to the welfare state’s entitlement programs, I can only concur. It then becomes easier to make my point: no one else is entitled to them, either."
https://mises.org/journal-libertarian-studies/sanctuary-society-and-its-enemies
What's the Libertarian, open borders solution when countries send their prison gangs to America?
"Tren de Aragua, a prison gang hailing from the Aragua region of Venezuela, has been sending its members across the US-Mexico border for years while also recruiting within the US among migrant communities, mainly in New York, Denver and Chicago."
https://nypost.com/2024/08/28/us-news/aurora-official-slams-denvers-sanctuary-city-policies-over-gang-crime/
We don't have to overcomplicate our response to Friedman's argument. Yes, it's true that increasing the population of welfare state beneficiaries is a bad thing, and that open borders contributes to such an increase. However, welfare statism attracts the native-born into the ranks of beneficiaries too, so you can't prevent the harms associated with welfarism by halting immigration. The only cure is to get rid of Social Security, Medicare, etc. and to get rid of the fiat dollar system that incentivizes politicians to increase their spendthrift behavior without any serious fiscal constraint.
Part of the problem with Friedman, and with most mainstream economists for that matter, is that they don't focus on (or in many cases, understand) the economic benefits of individuals taking personal responsibility for their own future economic security by saving and investing privately. When one attempts to collectivize such responsibility, one runs into the problems that (1) rational cost-benefit calculations for investing are impossible without free market prices driving the allocation of capital goods and inputs (i.e. the socialist calculation problem, codiscovered in 1920 by Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, Russian economist Boris Brutzkus, and German sociologist Max Weber); and (2) without productive investments in capital goods, the time available for transforming labor and natural resource inputs into outputs desired by consumers diminishes, resulting in a loss of factor productivity and real incomes (ideas that were developed in the late 19th century by the Austrian economists Carl Menger and Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk).
In other words, the decline in America's middle class over the past half century hasn't been caused by imports of Chinese goods, by immigrants, or by corporate greed. It has been caused a growth of Social Security and Medicare financed mostly by fiat dollar creation almost entirely (apart from a COVID-related spike) at the expense of net domestic investment ( https://cdn.mises.org/inline-images/image_80.png ).