My Opening Statement for the UATX Caplan-Jones Immigration Rematch

Garett Jones is the best critic of immigration in all of social science. In fact, it’s not even close. To the best of my knowledge, he is the only such critic who has seriously tried to show that the social costs of immigration are even more astronomical than the social benefits of immigration. In fact, he has ably tried to do this twice with two distinct lines of argument: first in his Hive Mind in 2015, and then in The Culture Transplant, published in 2022.

To understand Jones’ twin projects, you must first understand the incredible potential upside of open borders — a world where anyone can legally take a job anywhere. Fact: If a rich country like the United States allows a low-skilled foreigner from a Third World country to move here and work, his earnings almost instantly multiply by a factor of 5x, 10x, or even 15x. This is easy to visually verify, and the best statistical analysis confirms the obvious: any maid, gardener, or janitor from Haiti or Nigeria will leap from earning one or two thousand dollars a year to earning $15,000 or $30,000 a year. The reason, as usual in labor markets, is not employer charity, but worker productivity. Almost everyone is vastly more productive in the First World than in the Third World: The same farmer grows much more food, the same factory worker produces many more products, the same service sector worker saves much more valuable time.

The only intellectually challenging question is not whether immigration vastly multiplies an individual’s productivity, but whether this multiplication is scalable. Sure, handing out one work permit to one more person dramatically enriches humanity, and the same goes if we hand out 100 or 1000 work permits. But what if we hand out a million? Ten million? A hundred million? If this multiplication is fully scalable, simple math says that open borders would roughly double humanity’s Gross World Product. And while the critics of economics have long faulted us for reducing everything to GDP, economists have long had a mighty response: Virtually everything good — health, longevity, safety, leisure, civility, peace, culture, and more — goes hand-in-hand with GDP. To use Michael Clemens’ slogan, scalable mass migration looks like “trillion-dollar bills on the sidewalk” — an incredible opportunity that Western democracies stubbornly refuse to pick up.

Scalability is therefore the key question. The lazy objection is to summarily dismiss this as silly Ivory Tower theory. But Gulf monarchies like United Arab Emirates, which have gone from medieval poverty to futuristic opulence in a single lifetime, show that the potential gains of mass migration are totally real. Yes, the Gulf monarchies were rich in mineral wealth, but it was only by the power of sky-high migration — UAE is now almost 90% foreign-born — that they were able to take advantage of this opportunity.

The better objection is that the open borders also brings big cultural and political costs. Benevolent dictatorships may be able to defuse these downsides, but Western democracies somehow can’t. The subset of social scientists who recognize the incredible upside of immigration yet fear open borders normally appeal to these cultural and political costs. The problem is that the gains of immigration are so astronomical that we should happily endure big cultural and political costs to capture these gains.

The reason that Garett Jones towers above the other critics of immigration is that he tries to show that these cultural and political costs are not just big, but even more astronomical than the benefits. In Hive Mind, he shows that people from poor countries have low average IQ, and that average national IQ has a massive effect on nations’ GDPs. This effect is much larger for nations than for individuals, plausibly because low IQ does indirect cultural and political harm as well as direct economic harm. Estimated magnitude: If everyone on Earth moves to the United States, average IQ falls from 98 to 87, reducing U.S. GDP per-capita by 49%. But on closer examination, this does not show that the immigration is a net negative! On these assumptions, total Gross World Product still rises by 81%, roughly the same as the Clemens calculation that open borders would double the production of humanity.

What would this mean in practice? Specialization and trade between higher- and lower-IQ people. Higher-IQ people — disproportionately current citizens of the First World — would specialize in high-skilled work, especially management and entrepreneurship. Lower-IQ people — disproportionately current citizens of the Third World — would specialize in low-skilled work, especially basic services. This is the same logic as any well-run business: Google doesn’t hire college grads as janitors — but it has plenty of janitors.

Jones replied to this critique. He accepts my math, and objects simply that incomes will be too equal for current citizens of the First World to profit. As a result, foreigners reap more than 100% of the massive gains. But this is a bizarre position on many levels. General problem: In all of economic history, it is basically impossible to find any time large productivity gains were not widely shared. The Industrial Revolution did not just enrich factory owners, and the internet did not just enrich programmers. Specific problem: Jones’ reply assumes that the private payoff for intelligence stays the same even if the relative supply of high intelligence crashes. This is deeply implausible and contradicts the facts from countries where IQ inequality is high.

And even if my whole reply to Jones’ critique is wrong, Hive Mind strongly implies that the U.S. should eagerly welcome any migrant with an IQ of 98 or higher, which is well over a billion people worldwide.

Moving on: Jones’ more recent book, The Culture Transplant, presents another mechanism for the indirect costs of immigration to be massive enough to exceed immigration’s direct benefits. This “ancestry” or “SAT” (state history, agriculture, and technology) story is much harder to swiftly explain than his IQ story, so I’ll leave that task to him. Instead, I’ll point out the main issues with this work:

First, Jones doesn’t show that ancestry is an additional problem on top of IQ. And if you look at his data, this is a massive oversight. Why? Because the East Asian countries that famously grew rich despite some mediocre ancestry scores (specifically for his “Tech in 1500” measure) are all high IQ.

Second, if you repeat my previous thought experiment of moving the whole planet to the U.S., Jones’ estimates imply that GWP will more than double. Why? Because the ancestry scores of the United States are mediocre.

Third, contrary to Jones, immigrant assimilation is obviously high. Anyone who personally knows first-generation immigrants and their children sees this with their own eyes. American culture is so globally dominant that much of the world has already pre-assimilated to our language and way of life without ever setting foot in the country.

Last, Jones’ The Culture Transplant strongly implies that we should welcome all migrants with ancestry scores exceeding our own. Which, by most of his measures, turns out to be over two billion people.

There’s no time to respond to the countless other complaints about immigration, but here’s my general approach. I dismiss all vivid anecdotes as demagogic distractions. If you hear a story so juicy you’re dying to repeat it to “prove your point,” don’t. In contrast, if you’ve got ugly numbers, I’m happy to hear them. But before we act on these numbers, we should always remember the truly massive economic gains of immigration. Immigrant crime, welfare dependence, and so on are sometimes notable problems, but they’re rounding errors compared to the gains. There’s more to life than GDP? Sure, but GDP and almost everything else good go hand in hand.

Closing point: Since I’m at UATX, I fear that many listeners will dismiss pro-immigration views as “woke.” I have zero sympathy for woke philosophy; in fact, I’m the sole professor at my university who was willing to criticize the theory and practice of wokeness before our Board of Visitors. Still, even a woke clock is right twice a day, and I’m grateful that woke activists have loudly pushed back against recent anti-immigration policies.

That said, there are two night-and-day differences between immigration and every other notable woke cause. First, free immigration and meritocracy go hand in hand. You don’t have to pass laws to scare employers to hire and promote immigrants; in fact, you have to pass laws to scare employers to not hire and promote them. Second, immigration enforcement is the opposite of a “microaggression.” Governments around the world really do treat immigrants like criminals simply for trying to live and work without the right paperwork — paperwork that is almost impossible to obtain. If the critics of wokeness really stand for meritocracy and against brutal violations of basic human rights, they should be as pro-immigration as I am.