I agree regarding the importance of culture within a country, and how immigration can warp that. Honestly, the culture of many Americans is worse than the culture of many immigrants by my lights, but that doesn't mean that we should not worry about foreign cultures and how those interact with ours.
I found myself quite swayed by Caplan's keyhole exceptions, if I am remembering how he used the phrase correctly, regarding limiting access to welfare and other benefits as a condition of entry. I think that solves the (questionable) worries about immigrants sponging off the system, while at the same tending to select for better culture, as only those who are interesting in working are likely to show up. Plus, I suspect it would make them a lot less inclined to support a welfare state for others, moving the national culture in a direction I prefer. (My wife is an immigrant, and she has exactly zero sympathy for illegal immigration after how miserable her immigration process was; she views them as roughly jumping the line ahead of everyone else who is willing to follow the rules.)
However, as Klein points out, I am not at all sure that is how it would work in practice, especially as migrants are already not allowed many social benefits programs but seem to collect the benefits just the same.
Still, I am down for much more immigration, particularly if we can limit the downsides and keep out the murderers. If we can't, we need to limit immigration to the point where we can keep out the murderers and crazies pretty well. Possibly those two priorities are not compatible for our government. however.
"(My wife is an immigrant, and she has exactly zero sympathy for illegal immigration after how miserable her immigration process was; she views them as roughly jumping the line ahead of everyone else who is willing to follow the rules.)"
I'm quite confident that there's some largely genetic, highly fixed personality psychology going on in the difference between someone like this who would come out of such a process despising the rule-breakers, and someone like me who would come out of it despising the rules. Sometimes I have to explicitly remind myself that such a seemingly different species is actually the norm, and I'm the weird one.
I'd also make the point that the illegal immigrant may not have had the option to have it merely as bad as Hammer's wife. If they "wait in line" they may never be able to get in for their entire life. It's not a matter of simply waiting in line for the vast majority of the world's population.
Having a two tiered citizenship structure (keyhole solutions) is untenable. We have a word for that, apartheid. It's not a sustainable political equilibrium. That's why we have amnesties every generation, with birthright citizenship as another loophole.
Many of the wealthiest nations per capita have large populations who can't vote but don't generally complain because of how much they benefit from participating in the economy and society. Is there something about larger scale that would make it untenable?
I'm not sure why increased immigration should depend on keeping out murderers and crazies (although that would indeed be desirable). We already have murderers and crazies. The operative issue is whether the proportion of murderers and crazies among immigrants is higher or lower than that of the native population.
If it is lower, then the natives benefit from having a more peaceful population, even if the total number of bad people increases.
Similarly, we wouldn't automatically assume that babies being born in our country is bad, knowing that some people who are born will grow up to be murderers or crazies, since there is no a priori reason to think that those births worsen the state of the county.
I probably could have been more clear. I was thinking "keeping out murders/criminals to the point that we are not increasing their percentage of the population." Sort of along the lines of making sure drug gangs are not operating cross border with impunity, murderers are not fleeing into the US to avoid prosecution, that sort of stuff. Of course, if some set of people from Iwannastabuland are exceedingly stabby as a group, I could see arguments for sharply limiting their ability to immigrate.
I think there is a point in favor of limiting immigration to favor a better mix of criminals/normal people than we have in the home population, specifically that it is slightly controllable in a way that controlling births to limit criminals in the country is not. I think our justice system could stand to refocus a lot more on violence and property crimes to the exclusion of much else, but that's a whole other conversation. If, however, someone were to argue "While the native population sees a rate of 10% criminality, I am only willing to tolerate immigration such that we can limit the immigrant population is kept to 5% criminality," I wouldn't have a huge problem with that. I wouldn't push for 15%, certainly. If the question is one of screening, which I suspect is in fact a large part of it, then there is probably a level of immigration we can handle and hit those sorts of numbers, past which we are not really keeping track of who is coming in.
Of course, one could argue "not just immigrants, but their kids born here! They are the real problem!" I have rather less sympathy for that position, although I am not sure I could muster a good argument against it if it were shown that the kids of immigrants had an equal or higher rate of criminality, whether in total or by subgroup.
In general I am pretty ok with high immigration, but I do think that the cultural questions are worth taking seriously. Increasingly so, given the nonsense happening in Europe in particular.
A point that Yglesias makes, and maybe Caplan does as well, is that we currently have very restricted immigration in which it is very difficult for almost anyone to immigrate. Even if someone has concerns about some group or other, the focus should be on keeping *them* out, rather than keeping everyone else out.
That is, the current default is that everyone is excluded, except for exceptions who are allowed in, whereas if someone is really worried about some particular group (Chinese spies, Mexican rapists, French baguette thieves, etc.) one ought to advocate for keeping them out, and liberalizing immigration for others.
Maybe your sentiments distinguishing between a desired level of crime among immigrants vs. a desired level of crime among their children relates to a sense of fairness. It may seem unfair to penalize an immigrants based on the projected proclivities of their progeny, but it is fair to weed out immigrants based on their own characteristics - particularly if characteristics include things like criminal records.
In terms of the desired level of crime of immigrants, I would think that it may depend on how selective the US can be. Currently, many more people want to come to the US, than are allowed. The US could impose various limits on whom they allow, e.g. only Europeans, nobody with a criminal record, etc. and the demand would still exceed the number allowed, so you may as well shoot to limit immigrant to those with half the rate of criminality, as in your example.
If, however, the US would reach a point where immigration were so liberalized that measures designed to keep the crime rate of immigrants significantly lower than that of the native population would actually become an operative factor in limiting immigration, then I think they should be reconsidered.
The question is, would the US benefit from the average immigrant with the same propensity towards crime as a native born American. If the answer is yes, then why exclude them, given the massive humanitarian benefit to the immigrant, and the benefit to the US. If you could only accept one immigrant, then sure, limit the choice to whichever would be best, but if you are not limited, then why impose artificial limits?
Unless you assume that the average immigrant is a net negative and only outweighs that by being in some way exceptional, such as by committing much less crime.
Oh yea, I am on board with you. I think immigration ought to be opened up quite a bit, particularly if we are being a bit more picky about it (no criminal record, or what would count for one in the US, is a good start).
I think in general, immigrants are a net positive to the US. Some specific groups more, some less, perhaps, but we could definitely be doing more to focus on letting in the groups we prefer.
My only concern is the cultural one. I think that some cultural groups really are not so big on freedom, expect a more active and intrusive state, are more "go along to get along" types that don't stand up for their rights, or simply don't believe other people have rights if they are not part of their group. Certainly many in the US display that tendency, but my concern is that a larger percentage of the world population does than the US in particular. I don't think the average human is as serious about the principles of freedom as the average American.
How big of a concern is that? I don't know. I do see Europe becoming a pretty huge mess, but I don't know how much of that is the underlying EU government systems, how much the immigrants, or how much the interplay between them. It is definitely a question of immigrant culture and norms in Sweden from what I have read (which was a lot about 4-6 years ago), where native Swedes had pretty strong shared senses of how to work with the available system and what was ok vs exploitative, and new comers did not share that.
I think Caplan does recognize this as an issue as well. He himself has pointed out that the people determine how the government works, not so much how the rules are written, pointing out that if you replaced all the Frenchies with Brits and all the Brits with Frenchies the state of France would quickly function like the UK and vice versa (my words, his point.) So does the USA function like the USA if you put 100,000,000 immigrants into it really quickly? I expect not, unless in culture and habits and expectations those immigrants are really similar to US natives. Does it work with 50 million? 10? 100,000? I have no idea. Unfortunately I doubt anyone else does, or even that anyone has a good idea how to figure out what the optimal number is.
(I would LOVE to see a charter city start up and try free immigration, however, just to see what happens. My bet is that the number is pretty high, but that it is lowered by how active and responsive to public opinion the governing body is.)
Anyway, a lot of words to say that while I am pretty confident immigrants are net positive on straight economic margins, as well as not being more inclined to crime it seems (with perhaps the caveat that they would probably be even less inclined if they didn't live in cities so much) I am not sure that the cultural/political aspect doesn't make at least some large chunk net negative. Immigrants from California certainly have a reputation for voting for the same stupid stuff that made CA a hellhole, after all.
If we have very restricted immigration, why is the % of immigrants and their children at historically high levels?
What we have in practice is a lengthy process for legal immigration and virtually nonexistent enforcement against illegal immigration, which is de facto pretty close to Open Borders. Birthright citizenship, occasional amnesties, family re-unification, and asylum eventually turn illegals into legals, and in the meantime they are able to live in the country.
By definition, the restrictions are legal ones, so let's first look at legal immigration. Not adjusting for population, the peak number of people admitted to the US as legal permanent residents was achieved in 1991. Last year, our population was 31% higher, but LPR admitted were 59% lower.
The number of LPR admitted last year was lower than the number admitted a century earlier when the population was less than a third of its current population.
Over the last couple of decades, the US has admitted about a million LPR per year, which is much less than the estimated 150 million or so people who want to move to the US.
As far as illegal immigrants, the total number of illegal immigrants in the US rose rapidly in the 1990s, but remained about 11 million from 2005-2018. This is again much much lower than the total number of people who want to come here.
The percentage of immigrants in the US was about 15% from 1860-1910, then dropped steadily down to about 5% in 1970, then rose back to a little below its 19th century levels, and is currently about 13.7%. Notably, however, the rate of increase has been decreasing, with the increase in the aughts being lower than that of the nineties, and the increase in the teens, being lower than that of the aughts.
1) Foreign born %, not including illegal immigrants (?), is near historic highs that last resulted in a complete shut off in immigration in the 1920s.
2) The children of immigrants, including illegals, are not counted as immigrants above. But they should be. Just because an illegal gives birth in America doesn't make them American (birthright citizenship be damned).
The simplest measure would be % of the population that is non-white/non-black. Whites and blacks together made up 95% of the population in 1960. Today it's about 70% and falling fast, with younger cohorts being even lower.
Plug the Hispanic IQ into a formula and you find they are about 2/3 white and 1/3rd black on low IQ issues like crime. It's a plus to replace blacks with hispanics, but its still worse than white and most whites won't settle in highly hispanic areas.
It also depends what whites and what Hispanics your comparing. Whites in the Southwest are more violent than average, and Hispanics in the Northeast are worse than average.
Charles Murray has done some convincing work that Hispanic violence has a strong gang element that is worse in large cities, which makes sense to me.
I think "culture" can be tied to more concrete concepts like rights. In fact, saying we have a "right" to something doesn't have any meaning outside a social context. The community ultimately determines our rights.
To trade a property, I have to have the right to it. And in a practical sense, the right to a property boils down to everyone else recognizing it. If your community doesn't recognize and support your ability to do something, then it's not a right.
This makes membership in the polity a fundamental question. Do the people allow to join the polity have a fundamentally different conception of rights? If so, then accepting them into the polity is changing my fundamental rights.
Now, one may say, "sure, but that happens through generational change within the polity as well. Why are you singling out immigration as a potential source of problems?" And my answer would be that the problem of maintaining stable rights over time is already a difficult problem, and immigration may (in some cases) make it worse (I'd also suggest that in some cases it makes it better). But in no case should the problem be dismissed as non-existent.
While I disagree with how you formulated that argument, I agree heartily with the overall point. If we had some sort of list of fundamental rights, possibly enumerated into some sort of list, that the government promised to protect and wouldn't change every few weeks based on the whim of the mob, I would absolutely be more in favor of open borders. The biggest problem we face is that we have no such list, and so what rights we can get the government to enforce are only those rights they feel like enforcing at any given moment, subject to the will of the mob. As such, it really, REALLY matters who is in that mob, especially as so much of the rights violation happens at the hands of the government itself. (Outside of certain excessively crime ridden cities, that is.)
So, yes, I absolutely agree with your conclusion, even if not exactly your definition of "rights". :D
How do you disagree with the definition of rights?
FWIW, I don't disagree with enumerating fundamental rights. A constitution and laws serve as anchoring points for rights, but I think the basic nature of a right is as I've said; a right is a social construction that can only exist to the degree the group/community/polity allows it to exist.
Constitutional rights can only slow down the mob. If there is sufficient majoritarian sentiment against such rights over a prolonged period then either the constitution will be amended, judges will twist it to fit popular sentiment, or it simply won't be enforced and thus de facto not exist. They are a useful speed bump, but not a sufficient substitute for popular support.
Libertarians often talk about the wisdom of crowds. They hate public officials deciding what is right, and like individuals with skin in the game deciding what's right.
In every single place in the world today undergoing mass immigration the response from the locals is "NO!" Locals in Europe or America. Locals that are white, hispanic, or black. Locals on the border or locals in big liberal cities. People with skin in the game absolutely do not believe that trillions of dollars in value are being created by open borders. Across continents, races, politics, etc.
The most recent example in the USA is the complete success of the migrant busing program. In response to the failure of the federal government to secure the border the people that had to deal with its costs sent migrants to far away lands that had strong opinions about the border basically being open but didn't have to deal with the fallout. The arrival of a small fraction of those migrants in liberal cities caused them to declare a state of emergency, shuffle the arrivals along as best they can, beg for more not to be sent, and capitulate to the demands of the border cities. El Paso recently agreed to stop the migrant buses now that the federal government will agree to deport asylum seekers back to Mexico.
Governors in Texas and Florida are about to sail to easy re-elections mostly because Open Borders drove former immigrant Hispanics in these areas to massively shift in favor of the GOP because it promised to close the border. Democrats seeing a mid-term wipeout due to losses amongst these Hispanics are crying uncle.
If you can't sell immigration to co-ethnic former immigrants, maybe you just don't understand immigration.
Small point: most libertarian thinkers I know are not really big fans of "the wisdom of crowds." The wisdom of individuals deciding for themselves is very different from crowds deciding for crowds. The latter is a lot closer to public officials deciding what is right, as the crowd picks the official based on the official making promises to the crowd, after all.
In this example, I'm using "wisdom of crowds" to mean "the people who have to deal with it up close and have skin in the game" versus "far away experts".
An analogy would be to individuals participating in a market generating a "price" versus a central planner determining a "price". The individuals actually involved don't seem to agree that immigration creates trillions of dollars in value. But Bryan, the far away "expert", does.
Ok, but just to be clear, that is not what "wisdom of crowds" refers to.
Your example is actually exactly reversed. If everyone decided individually whether or not they would hire an immigrant, sell or rent a home to an immigrant, etc. that would be analogous to market price determination, and would also be exactly what Bryan would like the rule to be. If the crowd votes for varying levels of immigration and the politician espousing that level gets elected and enacts a law fixing it as such, that is the "wisdom of crowds" in action, and closer to the expert just picking (and not what Bryan thinks is a good idea.)
A renter can determine the price on his apartment, but he can't determine the price of the externalities (which he doesn't care about, they are external after all). You can perhaps get more money for a Section 8 renter than a regular renter, but nobody wants to live around disruptive Section 8 people.
Walmart might want to employ a lower wage illegal immigrant, but I don't want to pay for their healthcare or education out of my taxes, etc.
My community is an HOA. People vote on who should be in charge of the HOA and that person implementing the rules is literally how it gets done. If the HOA says that you can't rent to AirBnB, you can't rent to AirBnB. If some action you are taking has a negative impact on your neighbors, this gives the neighbors a veto power. If what you're doing really isn't that harmful, you talk to your neighbors and work it out. I've never had a significant problem with my HOA, they have always been reasonable.
Man, you are lucky... most of the HOA's I have dealt with were run by the most miserable old crones I could imagine. Literally, one had rules about what colors your window drapes and blinds could be, and they enforced that shit.
Anyway, I totally agree there are many externalities to immigration, mostly related to culture and how that translates into behaviors. Frankly, my experience with HOAs and actual governments suggests that many of those externalities are better solved but just not letting the HOAs and governments do so much. E.g. the state shouldn't make me pay for anyone's health care or education, no matter where they are from. That they do is the root of all these other problems.
However, there are definitely other externalities that are harder to deal with, but then we also have laws about those, which the government often fails to enforce.
If someone were to make the argument that more open immigration is an option once we A: get the government out of the e.g. health and education sectors (or at least make immigrants not eligible for those) and B: get the government to actually enforce properly laws so the guys stealing your bike or vandalizing or whatever get punished, I would be ok with that. I think A and B there are higher priorities than increasing immigration, anyway.
I might, however, point out that if they are not voting for A and B, then maybe it isn't about A and B and is just about limiting immigration. Many, I expect most, of the bad apples in the USA are not immigrants.
We purposely moved into a small development (20 houses) and not one of those 1,000 house Ryan homes monsters. If I want to change something in my HOA, I can literally talk to all the relevant people in an hour.
Immigrants vote Dem and Dems implement bad policies. I'm comfortable blaming immigrants. Individual issue polling indicates its a structural problem and not just a party affiliation issue.
I simply don't believe that immigrants have much to offer. I don't think their productivity increases $50k/year or whatever the second they step foot here. I view the upside as very limited.
If Bryan disagrees, I would be willing to sell him immigration visas at say $40k/year for the likely remaining life of the immigrant, plus any children they will have. If Bryan is a true utilitarian, he has to take such a deal. But I doubt he will. Nobody in favor of immigration ever offers to buy people citizenship. Which tells me they don't believe it either.
I think its a big point. It is the difference between whether an apartment owner decides if he wants to rent to an "illegal alien" or whether his neighbors decide.
When you rent an apartment to someone, it impacts the people living near that person. I would not want someone renting a nearby apartment to a rapist, even if the apartment owner could make more money renting to a rapist.
If immigration was really so enriching, local residents would see it clearly. Anyone who has gone shopping for real estate is extremely aware of peoples ability to judge how projected demographic shifts are likely to affect the quality of a neighborhood.
Yes, but everything everybody does impacts the people around them. We have to draw the line somewhere and say "This is my decision, regardless of the externalities." The existence of externalities itself is no argument for or against something, merely a recognition of the fact externalities exist.
To your second point, some immigrant locations are extremely valuable. For example, Chinatown in Philly has largely shifted from being where all the Chinese immigrants live to being a sort of Chinese themed tourist trappy place. Most of the actual, day to day immigrants have moved to north Philly or other areas because so many Philadelphians want to be around Chinatown it is too expensive to live there anymore.
So yea, some immigrant areas are horrible and people avoid them, and some are quite pleasant and turn highly desirable. Seems to depend more on the nature of the immigrants than the fact they are immigrants per se.
I used to be very in favor of Asian immigration, but COVID really changed my mind. They may not use a lot of welfare, but they do want to make you wear a mask all day. I'm just really repulsed by the conformism and safetyism. I've had to accept that most Asians aren't like the smart Korean male teenagers I went to high school with.
Further down the IQ ladder, I'm just not convinced people have anything to offer on net. The USA could probably have assimilated a small cohort of Hispanics, but it happened at too great a scale too quickly.
I too am very disappointed with the Asian American response to COVID. I wonder if the roof top Koreans have any relatives they could bring over... I liked those guys.
And yet you don't oppose walls and checkpoints to stop someone traveling from rural Arkansas or the south side of Chicago to the street just outside a swanky home in Marin County, do you?
What's your account for why these completely open borders aren't a crisis?
Because the people living within the borders of the USA are not fungible with the people living outside its borders. I believe that there are significant genetic and cultural differences between peoples that are not easy to change.
What is the difference between "cocksure" and the near equivalent "confident?" I think "cocksure" implies a rapid and largely unwarranted determination of the correctness of a held position, while "confident" does not. Given that Prof. Caplan has studied this issue in depth for many years and published a highly footnoted book on the subject, I'm surprised Prof. Klein favors the more pejorative and inappropriate term.
Bryan, you have chosen to build your life in an effectively closed-borders, selective environment, namely George Mason University. A university selects some smart fraction and excludes everyone else. This is certainly true for students and exceptionally true for faculty.
Your university and many others have extremely strong selection for youth, intelligence, rule-following, and socio-economic status. I would argue that this selection is central to the recipe for success of a university. Yet, university folk would scream to the high heavens about bigotry if a country ever tried to select people 1/10 as much as any good university does.
I admire you greatly -- you are one of the brightest lights of our age -- but on this topic I find you to be extremely hypocritical.
A university isn't a country. I don't see how this is in any way analogous. If people came here through open borders companies would still selectively hire them and universities would still selectively pick them in the way that you described. A university is also specialized and necessitates that you have a certain skillset to succeed. A country has innumerable jobs that require a large variety of different capabilities. Let's say you let in only people who can be doctors, why is that better than letting in more people who could work construction or do farm work?
Just to pile on, it isn't as though Bryan lives exclusively on the university grounds. He has his own house and all that, and Fairfax county has pretty open immigration relative to the US as a whole. Last I checked they don't even keep out Californians.
Hell, GMU isn't even a private campus. People can just walk on from outside, any time they want, and even enter the buildings during work hours. You don't even need a key card to get into class rooms, and in larger classes the prof probably wouldn't even notice.
Bryan lives in a town in Fairfax that has a lot of zoning to keep the poors out. Relative to Fairfax county its whiter, higher income, and has grown slower than the surrounding area.
A non-student does not have a right to walk around inside the GMU buildings, but that is hardly something that needs to be tightly enforced.
Why?
Fairfax County has the 3rd highest income of the 3000 or so counties in the US, so that's pretty exclusive already. The median home price in Fairfax County is $700,000.
GMU certainly could have strict enforcement of the campus of it ever wanted or needed to. Consider Johns Hopkins University, which has a police force of 200, 117 blue light call stations and 186 CCTV cameras on campus.
It is a whole ecosystem that is separate and distinct from the broader world. An inhabitant of a university ecosystem can live their whole life safe and sequestered from the grittier side of life.
Imagine a city where 100% of the inhabitants are college-educated. That is what a college campus is. Such a city would be extremely unrepresentative of broader society to say the least.
Dear Bryan "I really kinda like my own personal borders really tight, thank you" Caplan --
As I thought about it, something else came to mind: Universities are not like countries where you only have to prove yourself only once. Once you're in, the University can still kick you out. If you can't prove your smarts every semester, or if you can't keep paying a high amount every semester, sayonara! And unless you are among the elite faculty or in a PhD program, it is a pretty good bet than you are gone by age 25, like a girlfriend of Leo DiCaprio.
The extremely strict people-selection policies of universities have some remarkable effects. For example, in my state there is a city with a homicide rate higher that of El Salvador, the most dangerous country in the world. But right in the middle of that city is a special exclusionary zone that admits just 6.5% of applicants and is an oasis of beautiful serenity.
You are conflating public property with private property. Bryan doesn't advocate for the abolition of private property allowing everyone to use everyone's stuff. As for the crime issue, maybe we should deport all the natural citizens and keep the legal and illegal immigrants to reduce it!
All who cross a US border illegally have committed a crime, so open-borders CATO's data is obviously false from the get-go. Not reporting your income to the IRS is another major crime. What is the rate there among those in the country illegally? Half? More? Generally speaking, actual crime rates are unknowable because reporting rates are low for illegal immigrants, obviously. CATO's data is about as legit as a $3 bill.
"deport all the natural citizens" -- Lovely. On what basis? To where? Most of them don't have any other country.
Public property belongs to the citizens of a country. It is not the property of everyone in the world. By your rules, can I be part owner of Norway's sweet, sweet sovereign wealth fund?
Other than that, I agree with everything you said.
Obviously you can't include the fact that they are here illegally in the crime rate statistics or that renders it completely pointless. Someone actually seeking the truth about whether or not they commit more crimes once they are here, as is commonly claimed, wouldn't do that though. They would be interested in seeing whether open borders would lead to more crime, because in that scenario coming here isn't a crime. Only someone trying to rationalize their dogmatic view would argue as you did.
Deport all natural citizens is obviously tongue in cheek. Natural citizens commit more crimes, so if your measure of worthiness for being here is a lack of criminality I guess natural citizens are the first to go!
Public property belongs to the government. We don't own the public property. That's just a nice story they tell you. Try going to any public land and building a house then say that you own it. This is just another ridiculous bad faith argument so I know you don't actually care about the truth.
(1) "Only someone trying to rationalize their dogmatic view would argue as you did."
With all due respect, the extremist position in this conversation is the open-borders view, a view that an extremely small share of people in America espouse. Even very few immigrants espouse that few (just look at the remarkable showing of Trump in the almost entirely Hispanic and heavily Democrat precincts along the Texas-Mexico border), and virtually nobody in Europe holds that view.
That open-borders is the extreme view is not my rhetoric. It's just the statistical reality. Open-borders is openly held only by a few on a far end of the curve. It just so happens that our blog host, the brilliant Bryan Caplan, is the one of the principal advocates of this far-outlier position. I think you have lost sight of how outside of the mainstream this position is.
(2) It is quite relevant if someone began their stay in the United States by breaking the law. That is significant lawbreaking. It happened, even if you choose to ignore it. It shows, at the least, a basic disrespect for US laws.
The rate of taxes paid may be $1500 or so per person which us very low (not including things like sales tax which are unavoidable.)
(3) "if your measure of worthiness for being here is a lack of criminality"
I never said that -- actually, you began by pointing out crime statistics for illegal immigrants. I didn't start that. I merely responded that Cato's data on this is not remotely accurate.
Here is CDC homicide victimization data. Almost all homicide is intra-racial, so this is a proxy for rates of committing homicide by different groups.
Homicide is one crime that almost always gets reported, so it is the one reliable metric for comparison.
But I am only pointing out that Cato's data here is bunk, since you are eager deport Americans who have no country other than this one over bad crime data.
My mention of crime was in a different context: I brought up Baltimore which has a very high crime rate (by citizens, mostly) to point out that a university ecosystem is incredibly detached from the broader world.
My point has been and remains that it really, really hypocritical to argue open borders from within the walled garden of a university campus (or an extremely expensive neighborhood for that matter). (Walled garden doesn't mean there has to be a literal wall around the place.)
(4) Citizens are, in a sense, shareholders of public property, similar to how I am a shareholder of some companies. I obviously can't march into company headquarters of my stocks and do what I want but I am still a minority owner.
The government in the US system is in theory supposed to represent the citizens, as management is in theory supposed to represent shareholders. It doesn't always work out that way -- you get bad governments and bad managements -- but that is the idea anyway. If a company started giving a dividend to non-shareholders, that would be an instant lawsuit that the company would be guaranteed to lose.
Sweden still has one of the most liberal migration systems, I mean regarding labour immigration since it is almost open borders/free immigration. This is sadly gonna change with the new right-wing government with support from the far right. However, more people as liberals and libertarian left-wingers should fight for global free movement based on global digital citizenship.
Well, I think that racism is the most primitive for of collectivism and that one's IQ should not matter in relation to movement, neither within countries not between. After all, cognitive ability sand similar is about how one is as an individual
Bryan does tend to focus on U.S. policy, with relatively little attention to the rest of the world. *In the U.S.* women are not treated less fairly than men, *the U.S.* is so big and rich that it can and should absorb unlimited immigration, etc. This is not really objectionable--one must limit one's subject matter--but taking a broader perspective might reveal some limitations on his discussion of the U.S. case.
So, Klein, you are not opposing Open Borders, just advocating for a "careful rollout" of the policy: doing it at a "refrained scale" and speeding it up once we can be sure the sky is not falling on our heads.
I can live with that. Even been damn cocksure that the policy will be great for humankind.
And you can rest assure nothing terrible is going to happen. Afterall, the whole country is fully open to Californians and New Yorkers, and we have managed ...
What stops us from being invaded in the open borders scenario? I mean, the Chinese or Russian soldiers could just walk in, right? But then, the Chinese could easily send enough people to simply outvote us in some future election too, no fighting needed.
You should be right, since this is, basically what actual "Americans"("New North Americans", so to speak) did to Native Americans.
History repeating itself! But, obviously, we were kind of chosen by God to do this. Unlike the new "invaders".
If China would open its borders, will you, as a willing individual, go there to perform this kind of "invasion from within"? That's funny, we perceive ourselves as individuals, but the rest of the world is form by a shapeless mass of bodies with a common uniform will and totally committed to blindly sacrifie their individual happiness to the pursuit of their government's beligerant goals.
Russians are flying the country to avoid enlistment, but Chinese would be willing to come here to fight from within?. Yeah! it totally makes sense!
The difference is that China is an authoritarian gov't and they do have aggressive ambitions and a huge military willing to carry out orders. Your logic would lead to the conclusion that we need no national defense at all. Do you actually believe that? Russia is presently invading a neighbor.
In my scenario, the Chinese don't even need to "fight" anyway, just show up and maintain loyalty to their homeland when casting their ballot. The elected officials could then make us into a de facto Chinese satellite state.
Do you really believe that the American Gov't has not "aggressive ambitions"?. When was the last war fought in domestic soil? There is none! ... ever! (the "Revolutionary War" was, arguably, a civil war). Every war waged by the american armies (from the Indian wars to Afghanistan) has been a war in foreign soil (or a civil war). But, of course, when we do it, it is always for a just cause and not, like the Chinese, out of evil reasons.
Most of the defense expending is not to protect the Homeland but to be able to "project power" abroad. And yet, I don't think the US has any intention to invade China either from outside or from within.
But Chinese on the other hand ... sure that devilish bastards ...
If you think of other individuals being mostly like yourself: same intentions, same goals in life, same ways of pursuing happiness ... you would be right most of the times. At least so many times as other will right thinking this way about your intentions and goals.
I think we have no common ground, so I will probably disengage. But, once again, Russia and China are led by authoritarian regimes with personal power grabbing ambitions. I personally still think that most of the time the US does what it does for more-or-less noble reasons and not for blind power grabs. But whatever. Are we all eveil or all good? If we are all evil, we still need defense.
Your argument for open borders leads to the conclusion we need no defense at all, since everyone in the world is friendly and has no desire to do us harm. Do you really believe that?
Other side note: the War of 1812 was largely fought on American soil, and included the burning of the White House. So it isn't quite correct to assert there were no wars fought on domestic soil, ever.
Ok. Even not regarding the war of 1812 as a "civil war" that makes one war in domestic soil in almost 250 years ... hardly the record of a "mostly defensive" army.
The War of 1812 was in no conceivable way a civil war. I find myself highly skeptical of your historical knowledge and perspective, suddenly, or at least your ability to admit error and take on new ideas.
I think you are being a little too quick to dismiss his point here. During the Cold War, for instance, the Soviets really did send many spies and agents to the US to infiltrate and destabilize the country. Plenty of honest emigres as well came from the USSR, certainly, but lots of ones with ill intent.
We likewise see China spending great deals of money to buy influence and control in the US, and has many agents in form of emigres and second or even third generation Chinese in the US. That's with relatively closed borders.
If there were entirely open borders, and the CCP recruited some 2-3 million Chinese nationals to move to the same specific region, would that be beyond their capacity? How many would it take to swing the voting outcomes towards CCP agents in government, either directly controlled foreigners or bought natives?
That isn't a concern with, say, opening up borders to Iceland. Even if the entire population of Iceland moved here it wouldn't make much of a ripple and of course it would end Iceland the nation. A state such as China, however, really could pull something like that off, and importantly, doesn't exactly have a great record on human rights that would make you think it unlikely.
So, sure, the American Government is a bunch of ass holes who engage in a lot of evil, both foreign and domestic. That being true does not preclude that the Chinese government is also engaged in a lot of evil, both foreign and domestic. If I have to choose between the two, I would pick the US government over the CCP, and frankly, I suspect most Chinese would as well.
None of that detracts from the point that fully open borders (without keyhole solutions like "immigrants never get to vote, and their kids don't either) leaves open the door for a foreign government of a sufficiently large population to essentially relocate a giant voting bloc into your country. That's a real concern.
At the very least, I think we can all agree that the great powers, US, China, Russia maybe, contending for the top spot on the heap effectively always act as enemies towards each other, always seeking advantage over and plotting against their rivals. I wouldn't recommend China have fully open borders with the US, either. I wouldn't trust us if I were them.
Well, if you rely on mobilizing 3 million individuals and provide them with a common goal against something, then any "something" would be doomed.
The US sent "just" 2 million people to Europe in WWII ... and that was an extremely remarkable effort, never seen before or again.
So, if the whole world conspire against open borders they surely prevail. My guess is that most people would be very busy with their lives to engage in huge scale conspiracies, and I very much doubt that the Politburo Standing Committee, despite their recently rejuvenation, will engage in the conquering of the US by themselves.
The US has a population of ~340 million. 3 million is just a bit under 0.9% of the population. In 1940 the US had a population of ~132 million, so sending ~2 million represented about 1.5%.
China currently has a population of about 1.4 billion. 3 million would be just under 0.2% of their population. So... actually a much lower percentage than WW2 represented to the US, nearly 8 times smaller.
Further, in this scenario, they wouldn't be asking them to shoot anyone or get shot at (in fact both would be highly frowned upon!) but rather simply living in a higher standard of living country and voting according the party's wishes in exchange for a subsidy of some sort. No extra training, equipment, logistical support or really anything close to military expedition levels of requirements needed.
Again, you are dismissing the possibility too readily, perhaps because you don't quite grasp the scale of population differences.
As much as I am a passionate libertarian and (on some days) anarcho-capitalist, I have also learned from Conservatives that gradual change is how societies develop best.
So, as US emperor, I would liberalise immigration considerably, see how that goes for a few years, fix systems that break, and deal with unforeseen consequences. Then, knowing more from experience, probably do another round of liberalisation, and continue that cycle as long as it seems meaningful.
That may end with completely open borders, or it may come to rest earlier. What matters is that it's a process of *learning* and adjusting as you go.
I think what Klein means is that he used to be a liberal in general but switched to some kind of Groucho Marx free-market conservatism = "freedom for me and my own group" style of politics. Mass migration/immigration is a very arbitrary term because humans are not a mass and because different individuals have different psychological relations to numbers.
To be honest, I have not read much of his work. What I know from his behaviours in public debate is that he tends to behave as a "cafeteria liberal" = cherry picking, opportunism
I agree regarding the importance of culture within a country, and how immigration can warp that. Honestly, the culture of many Americans is worse than the culture of many immigrants by my lights, but that doesn't mean that we should not worry about foreign cultures and how those interact with ours.
I found myself quite swayed by Caplan's keyhole exceptions, if I am remembering how he used the phrase correctly, regarding limiting access to welfare and other benefits as a condition of entry. I think that solves the (questionable) worries about immigrants sponging off the system, while at the same tending to select for better culture, as only those who are interesting in working are likely to show up. Plus, I suspect it would make them a lot less inclined to support a welfare state for others, moving the national culture in a direction I prefer. (My wife is an immigrant, and she has exactly zero sympathy for illegal immigration after how miserable her immigration process was; she views them as roughly jumping the line ahead of everyone else who is willing to follow the rules.)
However, as Klein points out, I am not at all sure that is how it would work in practice, especially as migrants are already not allowed many social benefits programs but seem to collect the benefits just the same.
Still, I am down for much more immigration, particularly if we can limit the downsides and keep out the murderers. If we can't, we need to limit immigration to the point where we can keep out the murderers and crazies pretty well. Possibly those two priorities are not compatible for our government. however.
"(My wife is an immigrant, and she has exactly zero sympathy for illegal immigration after how miserable her immigration process was; she views them as roughly jumping the line ahead of everyone else who is willing to follow the rules.)"
I'm quite confident that there's some largely genetic, highly fixed personality psychology going on in the difference between someone like this who would come out of such a process despising the rule-breakers, and someone like me who would come out of it despising the rules. Sometimes I have to explicitly remind myself that such a seemingly different species is actually the norm, and I'm the weird one.
I'd also make the point that the illegal immigrant may not have had the option to have it merely as bad as Hammer's wife. If they "wait in line" they may never be able to get in for their entire life. It's not a matter of simply waiting in line for the vast majority of the world's population.
Having a two tiered citizenship structure (keyhole solutions) is untenable. We have a word for that, apartheid. It's not a sustainable political equilibrium. That's why we have amnesties every generation, with birthright citizenship as another loophole.
Maybe. I am not entirely certain two tiered systems, citizenship vs residency, are untenable.
Apartheid was something entirely different.
Many of the wealthiest nations per capita have large populations who can't vote but don't generally complain because of how much they benefit from participating in the economy and society. Is there something about larger scale that would make it untenable?
Which ones?
I'm not sure why increased immigration should depend on keeping out murderers and crazies (although that would indeed be desirable). We already have murderers and crazies. The operative issue is whether the proportion of murderers and crazies among immigrants is higher or lower than that of the native population.
If it is lower, then the natives benefit from having a more peaceful population, even if the total number of bad people increases.
Similarly, we wouldn't automatically assume that babies being born in our country is bad, knowing that some people who are born will grow up to be murderers or crazies, since there is no a priori reason to think that those births worsen the state of the county.
I probably could have been more clear. I was thinking "keeping out murders/criminals to the point that we are not increasing their percentage of the population." Sort of along the lines of making sure drug gangs are not operating cross border with impunity, murderers are not fleeing into the US to avoid prosecution, that sort of stuff. Of course, if some set of people from Iwannastabuland are exceedingly stabby as a group, I could see arguments for sharply limiting their ability to immigrate.
I think there is a point in favor of limiting immigration to favor a better mix of criminals/normal people than we have in the home population, specifically that it is slightly controllable in a way that controlling births to limit criminals in the country is not. I think our justice system could stand to refocus a lot more on violence and property crimes to the exclusion of much else, but that's a whole other conversation. If, however, someone were to argue "While the native population sees a rate of 10% criminality, I am only willing to tolerate immigration such that we can limit the immigrant population is kept to 5% criminality," I wouldn't have a huge problem with that. I wouldn't push for 15%, certainly. If the question is one of screening, which I suspect is in fact a large part of it, then there is probably a level of immigration we can handle and hit those sorts of numbers, past which we are not really keeping track of who is coming in.
Of course, one could argue "not just immigrants, but their kids born here! They are the real problem!" I have rather less sympathy for that position, although I am not sure I could muster a good argument against it if it were shown that the kids of immigrants had an equal or higher rate of criminality, whether in total or by subgroup.
In general I am pretty ok with high immigration, but I do think that the cultural questions are worth taking seriously. Increasingly so, given the nonsense happening in Europe in particular.
A point that Yglesias makes, and maybe Caplan does as well, is that we currently have very restricted immigration in which it is very difficult for almost anyone to immigrate. Even if someone has concerns about some group or other, the focus should be on keeping *them* out, rather than keeping everyone else out.
That is, the current default is that everyone is excluded, except for exceptions who are allowed in, whereas if someone is really worried about some particular group (Chinese spies, Mexican rapists, French baguette thieves, etc.) one ought to advocate for keeping them out, and liberalizing immigration for others.
Maybe your sentiments distinguishing between a desired level of crime among immigrants vs. a desired level of crime among their children relates to a sense of fairness. It may seem unfair to penalize an immigrants based on the projected proclivities of their progeny, but it is fair to weed out immigrants based on their own characteristics - particularly if characteristics include things like criminal records.
In terms of the desired level of crime of immigrants, I would think that it may depend on how selective the US can be. Currently, many more people want to come to the US, than are allowed. The US could impose various limits on whom they allow, e.g. only Europeans, nobody with a criminal record, etc. and the demand would still exceed the number allowed, so you may as well shoot to limit immigrant to those with half the rate of criminality, as in your example.
If, however, the US would reach a point where immigration were so liberalized that measures designed to keep the crime rate of immigrants significantly lower than that of the native population would actually become an operative factor in limiting immigration, then I think they should be reconsidered.
The question is, would the US benefit from the average immigrant with the same propensity towards crime as a native born American. If the answer is yes, then why exclude them, given the massive humanitarian benefit to the immigrant, and the benefit to the US. If you could only accept one immigrant, then sure, limit the choice to whichever would be best, but if you are not limited, then why impose artificial limits?
Unless you assume that the average immigrant is a net negative and only outweighs that by being in some way exceptional, such as by committing much less crime.
Oh yea, I am on board with you. I think immigration ought to be opened up quite a bit, particularly if we are being a bit more picky about it (no criminal record, or what would count for one in the US, is a good start).
I think in general, immigrants are a net positive to the US. Some specific groups more, some less, perhaps, but we could definitely be doing more to focus on letting in the groups we prefer.
My only concern is the cultural one. I think that some cultural groups really are not so big on freedom, expect a more active and intrusive state, are more "go along to get along" types that don't stand up for their rights, or simply don't believe other people have rights if they are not part of their group. Certainly many in the US display that tendency, but my concern is that a larger percentage of the world population does than the US in particular. I don't think the average human is as serious about the principles of freedom as the average American.
How big of a concern is that? I don't know. I do see Europe becoming a pretty huge mess, but I don't know how much of that is the underlying EU government systems, how much the immigrants, or how much the interplay between them. It is definitely a question of immigrant culture and norms in Sweden from what I have read (which was a lot about 4-6 years ago), where native Swedes had pretty strong shared senses of how to work with the available system and what was ok vs exploitative, and new comers did not share that.
I think Caplan does recognize this as an issue as well. He himself has pointed out that the people determine how the government works, not so much how the rules are written, pointing out that if you replaced all the Frenchies with Brits and all the Brits with Frenchies the state of France would quickly function like the UK and vice versa (my words, his point.) So does the USA function like the USA if you put 100,000,000 immigrants into it really quickly? I expect not, unless in culture and habits and expectations those immigrants are really similar to US natives. Does it work with 50 million? 10? 100,000? I have no idea. Unfortunately I doubt anyone else does, or even that anyone has a good idea how to figure out what the optimal number is.
(I would LOVE to see a charter city start up and try free immigration, however, just to see what happens. My bet is that the number is pretty high, but that it is lowered by how active and responsive to public opinion the governing body is.)
Anyway, a lot of words to say that while I am pretty confident immigrants are net positive on straight economic margins, as well as not being more inclined to crime it seems (with perhaps the caveat that they would probably be even less inclined if they didn't live in cities so much) I am not sure that the cultural/political aspect doesn't make at least some large chunk net negative. Immigrants from California certainly have a reputation for voting for the same stupid stuff that made CA a hellhole, after all.
If we have very restricted immigration, why is the % of immigrants and their children at historically high levels?
What we have in practice is a lengthy process for legal immigration and virtually nonexistent enforcement against illegal immigration, which is de facto pretty close to Open Borders. Birthright citizenship, occasional amnesties, family re-unification, and asylum eventually turn illegals into legals, and in the meantime they are able to live in the country.
By definition, the restrictions are legal ones, so let's first look at legal immigration. Not adjusting for population, the peak number of people admitted to the US as legal permanent residents was achieved in 1991. Last year, our population was 31% higher, but LPR admitted were 59% lower.
The number of LPR admitted last year was lower than the number admitted a century earlier when the population was less than a third of its current population.
Over the last couple of decades, the US has admitted about a million LPR per year, which is much less than the estimated 150 million or so people who want to move to the US.
As far as illegal immigrants, the total number of illegal immigrants in the US rose rapidly in the 1990s, but remained about 11 million from 2005-2018. This is again much much lower than the total number of people who want to come here.
The percentage of immigrants in the US was about 15% from 1860-1910, then dropped steadily down to about 5% in 1970, then rose back to a little below its 19th century levels, and is currently about 13.7%. Notably, however, the rate of increase has been decreasing, with the increase in the aughts being lower than that of the nineties, and the increase in the teens, being lower than that of the aughts.
Here's the cliff notes version:
1) Foreign born %, not including illegal immigrants (?), is near historic highs that last resulted in a complete shut off in immigration in the 1920s.
2) The children of immigrants, including illegals, are not counted as immigrants above. But they should be. Just because an illegal gives birth in America doesn't make them American (birthright citizenship be damned).
The simplest measure would be % of the population that is non-white/non-black. Whites and blacks together made up 95% of the population in 1960. Today it's about 70% and falling fast, with younger cohorts being even lower.
Plug the Hispanic IQ into a formula and you find they are about 2/3 white and 1/3rd black on low IQ issues like crime. It's a plus to replace blacks with hispanics, but its still worse than white and most whites won't settle in highly hispanic areas.
It also depends what whites and what Hispanics your comparing. Whites in the Southwest are more violent than average, and Hispanics in the Northeast are worse than average.
Charles Murray has done some convincing work that Hispanic violence has a strong gang element that is worse in large cities, which makes sense to me.
I think "culture" can be tied to more concrete concepts like rights. In fact, saying we have a "right" to something doesn't have any meaning outside a social context. The community ultimately determines our rights.
To trade a property, I have to have the right to it. And in a practical sense, the right to a property boils down to everyone else recognizing it. If your community doesn't recognize and support your ability to do something, then it's not a right.
This makes membership in the polity a fundamental question. Do the people allow to join the polity have a fundamentally different conception of rights? If so, then accepting them into the polity is changing my fundamental rights.
Now, one may say, "sure, but that happens through generational change within the polity as well. Why are you singling out immigration as a potential source of problems?" And my answer would be that the problem of maintaining stable rights over time is already a difficult problem, and immigration may (in some cases) make it worse (I'd also suggest that in some cases it makes it better). But in no case should the problem be dismissed as non-existent.
While I disagree with how you formulated that argument, I agree heartily with the overall point. If we had some sort of list of fundamental rights, possibly enumerated into some sort of list, that the government promised to protect and wouldn't change every few weeks based on the whim of the mob, I would absolutely be more in favor of open borders. The biggest problem we face is that we have no such list, and so what rights we can get the government to enforce are only those rights they feel like enforcing at any given moment, subject to the will of the mob. As such, it really, REALLY matters who is in that mob, especially as so much of the rights violation happens at the hands of the government itself. (Outside of certain excessively crime ridden cities, that is.)
So, yes, I absolutely agree with your conclusion, even if not exactly your definition of "rights". :D
How do you disagree with the definition of rights?
FWIW, I don't disagree with enumerating fundamental rights. A constitution and laws serve as anchoring points for rights, but I think the basic nature of a right is as I've said; a right is a social construction that can only exist to the degree the group/community/polity allows it to exist.
Constitutional rights can only slow down the mob. If there is sufficient majoritarian sentiment against such rights over a prolonged period then either the constitution will be amended, judges will twist it to fit popular sentiment, or it simply won't be enforced and thus de facto not exist. They are a useful speed bump, but not a sufficient substitute for popular support.
Yep
Libertarians often talk about the wisdom of crowds. They hate public officials deciding what is right, and like individuals with skin in the game deciding what's right.
In every single place in the world today undergoing mass immigration the response from the locals is "NO!" Locals in Europe or America. Locals that are white, hispanic, or black. Locals on the border or locals in big liberal cities. People with skin in the game absolutely do not believe that trillions of dollars in value are being created by open borders. Across continents, races, politics, etc.
The most recent example in the USA is the complete success of the migrant busing program. In response to the failure of the federal government to secure the border the people that had to deal with its costs sent migrants to far away lands that had strong opinions about the border basically being open but didn't have to deal with the fallout. The arrival of a small fraction of those migrants in liberal cities caused them to declare a state of emergency, shuffle the arrivals along as best they can, beg for more not to be sent, and capitulate to the demands of the border cities. El Paso recently agreed to stop the migrant buses now that the federal government will agree to deport asylum seekers back to Mexico.
Governors in Texas and Florida are about to sail to easy re-elections mostly because Open Borders drove former immigrant Hispanics in these areas to massively shift in favor of the GOP because it promised to close the border. Democrats seeing a mid-term wipeout due to losses amongst these Hispanics are crying uncle.
If you can't sell immigration to co-ethnic former immigrants, maybe you just don't understand immigration.
Small point: most libertarian thinkers I know are not really big fans of "the wisdom of crowds." The wisdom of individuals deciding for themselves is very different from crowds deciding for crowds. The latter is a lot closer to public officials deciding what is right, as the crowd picks the official based on the official making promises to the crowd, after all.
Like I said, small point.
In this example, I'm using "wisdom of crowds" to mean "the people who have to deal with it up close and have skin in the game" versus "far away experts".
An analogy would be to individuals participating in a market generating a "price" versus a central planner determining a "price". The individuals actually involved don't seem to agree that immigration creates trillions of dollars in value. But Bryan, the far away "expert", does.
Ok, but just to be clear, that is not what "wisdom of crowds" refers to.
Your example is actually exactly reversed. If everyone decided individually whether or not they would hire an immigrant, sell or rent a home to an immigrant, etc. that would be analogous to market price determination, and would also be exactly what Bryan would like the rule to be. If the crowd votes for varying levels of immigration and the politician espousing that level gets elected and enacts a law fixing it as such, that is the "wisdom of crowds" in action, and closer to the expert just picking (and not what Bryan thinks is a good idea.)
A renter can determine the price on his apartment, but he can't determine the price of the externalities (which he doesn't care about, they are external after all). You can perhaps get more money for a Section 8 renter than a regular renter, but nobody wants to live around disruptive Section 8 people.
Walmart might want to employ a lower wage illegal immigrant, but I don't want to pay for their healthcare or education out of my taxes, etc.
My community is an HOA. People vote on who should be in charge of the HOA and that person implementing the rules is literally how it gets done. If the HOA says that you can't rent to AirBnB, you can't rent to AirBnB. If some action you are taking has a negative impact on your neighbors, this gives the neighbors a veto power. If what you're doing really isn't that harmful, you talk to your neighbors and work it out. I've never had a significant problem with my HOA, they have always been reasonable.
The country is kind of like a giant HOA.
Man, you are lucky... most of the HOA's I have dealt with were run by the most miserable old crones I could imagine. Literally, one had rules about what colors your window drapes and blinds could be, and they enforced that shit.
Anyway, I totally agree there are many externalities to immigration, mostly related to culture and how that translates into behaviors. Frankly, my experience with HOAs and actual governments suggests that many of those externalities are better solved but just not letting the HOAs and governments do so much. E.g. the state shouldn't make me pay for anyone's health care or education, no matter where they are from. That they do is the root of all these other problems.
However, there are definitely other externalities that are harder to deal with, but then we also have laws about those, which the government often fails to enforce.
If someone were to make the argument that more open immigration is an option once we A: get the government out of the e.g. health and education sectors (or at least make immigrants not eligible for those) and B: get the government to actually enforce properly laws so the guys stealing your bike or vandalizing or whatever get punished, I would be ok with that. I think A and B there are higher priorities than increasing immigration, anyway.
I might, however, point out that if they are not voting for A and B, then maybe it isn't about A and B and is just about limiting immigration. Many, I expect most, of the bad apples in the USA are not immigrants.
We purposely moved into a small development (20 houses) and not one of those 1,000 house Ryan homes monsters. If I want to change something in my HOA, I can literally talk to all the relevant people in an hour.
Immigrants vote Dem and Dems implement bad policies. I'm comfortable blaming immigrants. Individual issue polling indicates its a structural problem and not just a party affiliation issue.
I simply don't believe that immigrants have much to offer. I don't think their productivity increases $50k/year or whatever the second they step foot here. I view the upside as very limited.
If Bryan disagrees, I would be willing to sell him immigration visas at say $40k/year for the likely remaining life of the immigrant, plus any children they will have. If Bryan is a true utilitarian, he has to take such a deal. But I doubt he will. Nobody in favor of immigration ever offers to buy people citizenship. Which tells me they don't believe it either.
I think its a big point. It is the difference between whether an apartment owner decides if he wants to rent to an "illegal alien" or whether his neighbors decide.
When you rent an apartment to someone, it impacts the people living near that person. I would not want someone renting a nearby apartment to a rapist, even if the apartment owner could make more money renting to a rapist.
If immigration was really so enriching, local residents would see it clearly. Anyone who has gone shopping for real estate is extremely aware of peoples ability to judge how projected demographic shifts are likely to affect the quality of a neighborhood.
Yes, but everything everybody does impacts the people around them. We have to draw the line somewhere and say "This is my decision, regardless of the externalities." The existence of externalities itself is no argument for or against something, merely a recognition of the fact externalities exist.
To your second point, some immigrant locations are extremely valuable. For example, Chinatown in Philly has largely shifted from being where all the Chinese immigrants live to being a sort of Chinese themed tourist trappy place. Most of the actual, day to day immigrants have moved to north Philly or other areas because so many Philadelphians want to be around Chinatown it is too expensive to live there anymore.
So yea, some immigrant areas are horrible and people avoid them, and some are quite pleasant and turn highly desirable. Seems to depend more on the nature of the immigrants than the fact they are immigrants per se.
I used to be very in favor of Asian immigration, but COVID really changed my mind. They may not use a lot of welfare, but they do want to make you wear a mask all day. I'm just really repulsed by the conformism and safetyism. I've had to accept that most Asians aren't like the smart Korean male teenagers I went to high school with.
Further down the IQ ladder, I'm just not convinced people have anything to offer on net. The USA could probably have assimilated a small cohort of Hispanics, but it happened at too great a scale too quickly.
I too am very disappointed with the Asian American response to COVID. I wonder if the roof top Koreans have any relatives they could bring over... I liked those guys.
Small in the sense that if he just deleted those first two sentences, the problem goes away :)
And yet you don't oppose walls and checkpoints to stop someone traveling from rural Arkansas or the south side of Chicago to the street just outside a swanky home in Marin County, do you?
What's your account for why these completely open borders aren't a crisis?
Not only that, but the residents of NYC or Chicago or San Francisco are a bigger threat to American culture than an equivalent number of immigrants.
Because the people living within the borders of the USA are not fungible with the people living outside its borders. I believe that there are significant genetic and cultural differences between peoples that are not easy to change.
Will Garrett Jones' "The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To a Lot Like the Ones They Left" get a review on Bet On It?
What is the difference between "cocksure" and the near equivalent "confident?" I think "cocksure" implies a rapid and largely unwarranted determination of the correctness of a held position, while "confident" does not. Given that Prof. Caplan has studied this issue in depth for many years and published a highly footnoted book on the subject, I'm surprised Prof. Klein favors the more pejorative and inappropriate term.
Bryan, you have chosen to build your life in an effectively closed-borders, selective environment, namely George Mason University. A university selects some smart fraction and excludes everyone else. This is certainly true for students and exceptionally true for faculty.
Your university and many others have extremely strong selection for youth, intelligence, rule-following, and socio-economic status. I would argue that this selection is central to the recipe for success of a university. Yet, university folk would scream to the high heavens about bigotry if a country ever tried to select people 1/10 as much as any good university does.
I admire you greatly -- you are one of the brightest lights of our age -- but on this topic I find you to be extremely hypocritical.
A university isn't a country. I don't see how this is in any way analogous. If people came here through open borders companies would still selectively hire them and universities would still selectively pick them in the way that you described. A university is also specialized and necessitates that you have a certain skillset to succeed. A country has innumerable jobs that require a large variety of different capabilities. Let's say you let in only people who can be doctors, why is that better than letting in more people who could work construction or do farm work?
Just to pile on, it isn't as though Bryan lives exclusively on the university grounds. He has his own house and all that, and Fairfax county has pretty open immigration relative to the US as a whole. Last I checked they don't even keep out Californians.
Hell, GMU isn't even a private campus. People can just walk on from outside, any time they want, and even enter the buildings during work hours. You don't even need a key card to get into class rooms, and in larger classes the prof probably wouldn't even notice.
Bryan lives in a town in Fairfax that has a lot of zoning to keep the poors out. Relative to Fairfax county its whiter, higher income, and has grown slower than the surrounding area.
A non-student does not have a right to walk around inside the GMU buildings, but that is hardly something that needs to be tightly enforced.
Why?
Fairfax County has the 3rd highest income of the 3000 or so counties in the US, so that's pretty exclusive already. The median home price in Fairfax County is $700,000.
GMU certainly could have strict enforcement of the campus of it ever wanted or needed to. Consider Johns Hopkins University, which has a police force of 200, 117 blue light call stations and 186 CCTV cameras on campus.
So your claim is that Bryan lives in a highly exclusive place that doesn't bother to exclude people? What about it is exclusive then?
And yea, Fairfax Co. is a pretty expensive place, but much like DC, NYC, San Fran, etc. the median is high, but the bottom end is really, really low.
"What about it is exclusive then?"
Did you even read my comment?
"the bottom end is really, really low"
My sides! I honestly can't stop laughing!
Juarez, East St. Louis, Fairfax County, Virginia. Man, I've seen some rough places in my day.
Seriously, I am from around here and have done multiple service projects in West Baltimore. You have no idea what you are talking about.
But the immediate environs of Mason is Fairfax City specifically. Lets have a look:
https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/us/va/fairfax-city/murder-homicide-rate-statistics
Brutal, just brutal.
A university is not like most companies either.
It is a whole ecosystem that is separate and distinct from the broader world. An inhabitant of a university ecosystem can live their whole life safe and sequestered from the grittier side of life.
Imagine a city where 100% of the inhabitants are college-educated. That is what a college campus is. Such a city would be extremely unrepresentative of broader society to say the least.
Dear Bryan "I really kinda like my own personal borders really tight, thank you" Caplan --
As I thought about it, something else came to mind: Universities are not like countries where you only have to prove yourself only once. Once you're in, the University can still kick you out. If you can't prove your smarts every semester, or if you can't keep paying a high amount every semester, sayonara! And unless you are among the elite faculty or in a PhD program, it is a pretty good bet than you are gone by age 25, like a girlfriend of Leo DiCaprio.
The extremely strict people-selection policies of universities have some remarkable effects. For example, in my state there is a city with a homicide rate higher that of El Salvador, the most dangerous country in the world. But right in the middle of that city is a special exclusionary zone that admits just 6.5% of applicants and is an oasis of beautiful serenity.
https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/md/baltimore/crime
Interestingly, it is from within such special exclusionary zones that we get the strongest open-borders voices.
You are conflating public property with private property. Bryan doesn't advocate for the abolition of private property allowing everyone to use everyone's stuff. As for the crime issue, maybe we should deport all the natural citizens and keep the legal and illegal immigrants to reduce it!
https://www.cato.org/blog/new-research-illegal-immigration-crime-0
All who cross a US border illegally have committed a crime, so open-borders CATO's data is obviously false from the get-go. Not reporting your income to the IRS is another major crime. What is the rate there among those in the country illegally? Half? More? Generally speaking, actual crime rates are unknowable because reporting rates are low for illegal immigrants, obviously. CATO's data is about as legit as a $3 bill.
"deport all the natural citizens" -- Lovely. On what basis? To where? Most of them don't have any other country.
Public property belongs to the citizens of a country. It is not the property of everyone in the world. By your rules, can I be part owner of Norway's sweet, sweet sovereign wealth fund?
Other than that, I agree with everything you said.
Obviously you can't include the fact that they are here illegally in the crime rate statistics or that renders it completely pointless. Someone actually seeking the truth about whether or not they commit more crimes once they are here, as is commonly claimed, wouldn't do that though. They would be interested in seeing whether open borders would lead to more crime, because in that scenario coming here isn't a crime. Only someone trying to rationalize their dogmatic view would argue as you did.
Deport all natural citizens is obviously tongue in cheek. Natural citizens commit more crimes, so if your measure of worthiness for being here is a lack of criminality I guess natural citizens are the first to go!
Public property belongs to the government. We don't own the public property. That's just a nice story they tell you. Try going to any public land and building a house then say that you own it. This is just another ridiculous bad faith argument so I know you don't actually care about the truth.
(1) "Only someone trying to rationalize their dogmatic view would argue as you did."
With all due respect, the extremist position in this conversation is the open-borders view, a view that an extremely small share of people in America espouse. Even very few immigrants espouse that few (just look at the remarkable showing of Trump in the almost entirely Hispanic and heavily Democrat precincts along the Texas-Mexico border), and virtually nobody in Europe holds that view.
That open-borders is the extreme view is not my rhetoric. It's just the statistical reality. Open-borders is openly held only by a few on a far end of the curve. It just so happens that our blog host, the brilliant Bryan Caplan, is the one of the principal advocates of this far-outlier position. I think you have lost sight of how outside of the mainstream this position is.
(2) It is quite relevant if someone began their stay in the United States by breaking the law. That is significant lawbreaking. It happened, even if you choose to ignore it. It shows, at the least, a basic disrespect for US laws.
This disrespect for the law continues with taxes.
https://www.fairus.org/issue/publications-resources/fiscal-burden-illegal-immigration-united-states-taxpayers
The rate of taxes paid may be $1500 or so per person which us very low (not including things like sales tax which are unavoidable.)
(3) "if your measure of worthiness for being here is a lack of criminality"
I never said that -- actually, you began by pointing out crime statistics for illegal immigrants. I didn't start that. I merely responded that Cato's data on this is not remotely accurate.
Here is CDC homicide victimization data. Almost all homicide is intra-racial, so this is a proxy for rates of committing homicide by different groups.
https://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Screen-Shot-2022-10-25-at-7.45.54-AM.png
Homicide is one crime that almost always gets reported, so it is the one reliable metric for comparison.
But I am only pointing out that Cato's data here is bunk, since you are eager deport Americans who have no country other than this one over bad crime data.
My mention of crime was in a different context: I brought up Baltimore which has a very high crime rate (by citizens, mostly) to point out that a university ecosystem is incredibly detached from the broader world.
My point has been and remains that it really, really hypocritical to argue open borders from within the walled garden of a university campus (or an extremely expensive neighborhood for that matter). (Walled garden doesn't mean there has to be a literal wall around the place.)
(4) Citizens are, in a sense, shareholders of public property, similar to how I am a shareholder of some companies. I obviously can't march into company headquarters of my stocks and do what I want but I am still a minority owner.
The government in the US system is in theory supposed to represent the citizens, as management is in theory supposed to represent shareholders. It doesn't always work out that way -- you get bad governments and bad managements -- but that is the idea anyway. If a company started giving a dividend to non-shareholders, that would be an instant lawsuit that the company would be guaranteed to lose.
Sweden still has one of the most liberal migration systems, I mean regarding labour immigration since it is almost open borders/free immigration. This is sadly gonna change with the new right-wing government with support from the far right. However, more people as liberals and libertarian left-wingers should fight for global free movement based on global digital citizenship.
Why would people need any citizenship, including digital one?
There are several reasons
- Legal ID, not being undocumented nor "illegal"
- Being able to cooperate with private, community and public institutions
- Not being stopped at the borders for arbitrary reasons
- Civility, affections, engagement
https://vladanlausevic.medium.com/self-sovereign-identity-as-global-citizenship-e3892b00d0df
What is HBD? Don't say it is about human biodiveristy :P
Well, I think that racism is the most primitive for of collectivism and that one's IQ should not matter in relation to movement, neither within countries not between. After all, cognitive ability sand similar is about how one is as an individual
Bryan does tend to focus on U.S. policy, with relatively little attention to the rest of the world. *In the U.S.* women are not treated less fairly than men, *the U.S.* is so big and rich that it can and should absorb unlimited immigration, etc. This is not really objectionable--one must limit one's subject matter--but taking a broader perspective might reveal some limitations on his discussion of the U.S. case.
So, Klein, you are not opposing Open Borders, just advocating for a "careful rollout" of the policy: doing it at a "refrained scale" and speeding it up once we can be sure the sky is not falling on our heads.
I can live with that. Even been damn cocksure that the policy will be great for humankind.
And you can rest assure nothing terrible is going to happen. Afterall, the whole country is fully open to Californians and New Yorkers, and we have managed ...
... so far.
I think this is a very interesting discussion, and I thank both for their contributions.
What stops us from being invaded in the open borders scenario? I mean, the Chinese or Russian soldiers could just walk in, right? But then, the Chinese could easily send enough people to simply outvote us in some future election too, no fighting needed.
You should be right, since this is, basically what actual "Americans"("New North Americans", so to speak) did to Native Americans.
History repeating itself! But, obviously, we were kind of chosen by God to do this. Unlike the new "invaders".
If China would open its borders, will you, as a willing individual, go there to perform this kind of "invasion from within"? That's funny, we perceive ourselves as individuals, but the rest of the world is form by a shapeless mass of bodies with a common uniform will and totally committed to blindly sacrifie their individual happiness to the pursuit of their government's beligerant goals.
Russians are flying the country to avoid enlistment, but Chinese would be willing to come here to fight from within?. Yeah! it totally makes sense!
The difference is that China is an authoritarian gov't and they do have aggressive ambitions and a huge military willing to carry out orders. Your logic would lead to the conclusion that we need no national defense at all. Do you actually believe that? Russia is presently invading a neighbor.
In my scenario, the Chinese don't even need to "fight" anyway, just show up and maintain loyalty to their homeland when casting their ballot. The elected officials could then make us into a de facto Chinese satellite state.
Do you really believe that the American Gov't has not "aggressive ambitions"?. When was the last war fought in domestic soil? There is none! ... ever! (the "Revolutionary War" was, arguably, a civil war). Every war waged by the american armies (from the Indian wars to Afghanistan) has been a war in foreign soil (or a civil war). But, of course, when we do it, it is always for a just cause and not, like the Chinese, out of evil reasons.
Most of the defense expending is not to protect the Homeland but to be able to "project power" abroad. And yet, I don't think the US has any intention to invade China either from outside or from within.
But Chinese on the other hand ... sure that devilish bastards ...
If you think of other individuals being mostly like yourself: same intentions, same goals in life, same ways of pursuing happiness ... you would be right most of the times. At least so many times as other will right thinking this way about your intentions and goals.
I think we have no common ground, so I will probably disengage. But, once again, Russia and China are led by authoritarian regimes with personal power grabbing ambitions. I personally still think that most of the time the US does what it does for more-or-less noble reasons and not for blind power grabs. But whatever. Are we all eveil or all good? If we are all evil, we still need defense.
Your argument for open borders leads to the conclusion we need no defense at all, since everyone in the world is friendly and has no desire to do us harm. Do you really believe that?
Other side note: the War of 1812 was largely fought on American soil, and included the burning of the White House. So it isn't quite correct to assert there were no wars fought on domestic soil, ever.
Ok. Even not regarding the war of 1812 as a "civil war" that makes one war in domestic soil in almost 250 years ... hardly the record of a "mostly defensive" army.
The War of 1812 was in no conceivable way a civil war. I find myself highly skeptical of your historical knowledge and perspective, suddenly, or at least your ability to admit error and take on new ideas.
I think you are being a little too quick to dismiss his point here. During the Cold War, for instance, the Soviets really did send many spies and agents to the US to infiltrate and destabilize the country. Plenty of honest emigres as well came from the USSR, certainly, but lots of ones with ill intent.
We likewise see China spending great deals of money to buy influence and control in the US, and has many agents in form of emigres and second or even third generation Chinese in the US. That's with relatively closed borders.
If there were entirely open borders, and the CCP recruited some 2-3 million Chinese nationals to move to the same specific region, would that be beyond their capacity? How many would it take to swing the voting outcomes towards CCP agents in government, either directly controlled foreigners or bought natives?
That isn't a concern with, say, opening up borders to Iceland. Even if the entire population of Iceland moved here it wouldn't make much of a ripple and of course it would end Iceland the nation. A state such as China, however, really could pull something like that off, and importantly, doesn't exactly have a great record on human rights that would make you think it unlikely.
So, sure, the American Government is a bunch of ass holes who engage in a lot of evil, both foreign and domestic. That being true does not preclude that the Chinese government is also engaged in a lot of evil, both foreign and domestic. If I have to choose between the two, I would pick the US government over the CCP, and frankly, I suspect most Chinese would as well.
None of that detracts from the point that fully open borders (without keyhole solutions like "immigrants never get to vote, and their kids don't either) leaves open the door for a foreign government of a sufficiently large population to essentially relocate a giant voting bloc into your country. That's a real concern.
At the very least, I think we can all agree that the great powers, US, China, Russia maybe, contending for the top spot on the heap effectively always act as enemies towards each other, always seeking advantage over and plotting against their rivals. I wouldn't recommend China have fully open borders with the US, either. I wouldn't trust us if I were them.
Well, if you rely on mobilizing 3 million individuals and provide them with a common goal against something, then any "something" would be doomed.
The US sent "just" 2 million people to Europe in WWII ... and that was an extremely remarkable effort, never seen before or again.
So, if the whole world conspire against open borders they surely prevail. My guess is that most people would be very busy with their lives to engage in huge scale conspiracies, and I very much doubt that the Politburo Standing Committee, despite their recently rejuvenation, will engage in the conquering of the US by themselves.
The US has a population of ~340 million. 3 million is just a bit under 0.9% of the population. In 1940 the US had a population of ~132 million, so sending ~2 million represented about 1.5%.
China currently has a population of about 1.4 billion. 3 million would be just under 0.2% of their population. So... actually a much lower percentage than WW2 represented to the US, nearly 8 times smaller.
Further, in this scenario, they wouldn't be asking them to shoot anyone or get shot at (in fact both would be highly frowned upon!) but rather simply living in a higher standard of living country and voting according the party's wishes in exchange for a subsidy of some sort. No extra training, equipment, logistical support or really anything close to military expedition levels of requirements needed.
Again, you are dismissing the possibility too readily, perhaps because you don't quite grasp the scale of population differences.
And you are missing some of the most interesting potential consequences: some of the American liberals will cross to Canada or move to France.
That could potentially improve the outcome of democratic elections in many places in the US!
As much as I am a passionate libertarian and (on some days) anarcho-capitalist, I have also learned from Conservatives that gradual change is how societies develop best.
So, as US emperor, I would liberalise immigration considerably, see how that goes for a few years, fix systems that break, and deal with unforeseen consequences. Then, knowing more from experience, probably do another round of liberalisation, and continue that cycle as long as it seems meaningful.
That may end with completely open borders, or it may come to rest earlier. What matters is that it's a process of *learning* and adjusting as you go.
Open to what? Formal trade in licit goods and services? Direct and portfolio investment? Labor? Two outta three?
Complicated formulas by this Klein guy. True freedom knows no quotas and formulas to let peaceful people live their lives wherever they want.
The attribution here makes it look like Bryan authored the post. It should be clearer these are Klein's words.
I think what Klein means is that he used to be a liberal in general but switched to some kind of Groucho Marx free-market conservatism = "freedom for me and my own group" style of politics. Mass migration/immigration is a very arbitrary term because humans are not a mass and because different individuals have different psychological relations to numbers.
You think incorrectly, very much so. Klein means nothing of the sort, as even a casual look through his writings over the years demonstrates.
To be honest, I have not read much of his work. What I know from his behaviours in public debate is that he tends to behave as a "cafeteria liberal" = cherry picking, opportunism
Speaking about Arpi, the guy is a right-wing collectivist. https://glibe.substack.com/p/white-racial-self-interest-is-racism