This is reasonable. Emigration is happening in multiple countries and they are all offering different deals, and so it's a dynamic game with different effects on different players. Our current system is let people who don't respect rules in, or patient and people with the ability to and luck to get through the bureaucracy seems like we're not playing the best strategy. I take Brian's moral arguments seriously, and wish to live in a world in which people can move more freely, but you need to acknowledge that some folks have negative value and one goal of our system is to ensuring we have as few of those as possible. One by not letting them in, and two through creating a united culture that makes it makes it unlikely people born here become negative in terms of value.
My synthesis of Bryan and Garret jones is we can let as many people as possible who produce positive value, as long as we can create rules that accomdiate growth easily.
The other issue with Bryans arguments is that it justifies colonialism. Would Mexico be as rich as the US if we just took over and imposed our rules instead of theirs? If yes than immigration isn't needed, if no, then why would you assume immigration of their entire population add value? You can't have it both ways. I can see some ways to reslove this, but not many
Mexico is already composed of 31 states, and it wouldn't make much sense to have a single state that is more than 3 times more populous than California, so probably the 51st through 81st states. Mexicans would be almost 40% of the Senate and almost 30% of the House of Representatives and electoral votes for President. So how much would the post-annexation country be similar to the pre-annexation country, and how much would it be similar to Mexico as it is now? So colonialism is probably more justifiable.
In general, the larger the deviation one makes from the status quo, the more unpredictable the results. I would like to believe that we could move to something close to open borders. But my Burkean side says to proceed gradually. Radical proposals often make useful thought experiments, but I don’t trust them to work out in practice.
I think a stronger version of Bryan’s argument is something like: Here are a bunch of reasons why open borders could work out really well. Let’s take some incremental steps in that direction and see how it goes. If things go well, we’ll move further. If unexpected problems arise, let’s figure out how to mitigate them before pushing further.
It seems unclear to me what would count as gradual here. The obvious candidate is to let in a few more people legally, by increasing quotas or lowering restrictions. But would this signal cause the current stream of illegal entry to shift to legal entry? Or would it encourage even more illegal entry? If the policy seems permanent, it lowers the cost of legal entry, meaning more persons would tend to choose it, but it isn’t clear that it would not also increase demand generally, with unclear effects on illegal entry. If it is credibly temporary, with ever less restrictive policies on the horizon, does that cause people to want to wait enough to have the desired effect? I’m not sure.
Would anything else count as “gradual”? What is a good way to ease into having more immigration, while reserving the ability to reverse the policy if things don’t work out?
I would like to see Bryan engaging with I/o on X, who is a data oriented account that holds the centrist position on immigration, which is that some immigrant groups are a net positive and others a net negative, increasing disorder and not successfully becoming productive. I/o specifically points to Muslim immigration in Europe as an example of an “open borders” style policy that has gone poorly for host countries. I think Bryan addresses this concern by saying that host countries should simply not extend benefits and ??? For the disorder. It’s not a convincing response and doesn’t seem thought through. A debate on X would be interesting.
BTW: 2 people arrive in America and intend to stay: one by crossing the border, the other by emerging from a birth canal. Both will be "competing for jobs". Why do we think they are so different?
WEIRD (Western, Educated, individualized, rich, democratic) culture is very different from other cultures around the world, so someone born into it would be very different from someone who migrated.
One relevant difference is that WEIRD culture is more likely to play fair with a set of rules, and non WEIRD culture is more likely to subvert them. There are socio-economic reasons of course for this difference but it highlights the fact that yes, the two people you mentioned are different in ways that will affect the culture of society.
Yet many American citizens hate America and take freedom for granted. While immigrants are self selected to love American. I am one of those immigrants.
Don't all of the open borders arguments apply to public university admission? Why does Caplan fully endorse highly selective capped admission for public/government universities? If government said anyone was allowed to walk into a public university and pay full tuition to take a math or engineering class and get whatever grade they get, what is the libertarian argument against that?
Tyler Cowen says selective capped university admission is important for social cohesion, "[an elite university class] is supposed to be cohesive rather than anonymous, more like a memorable social event than a visit to a giant retail warehouse." and to protect the culture of the social elites: "start with the general point that social elites need to replicate themselves, one way or another. Otherwise they tend to fade away;"
These arguments that Tyler Cowen makes in defense of selective capped elite university admission sound exactly like the arguments made for highly restrictive immigration policy: we want to protect our culture, our legacy, and enhance social cohesion.
Can't the culture of the social elites be protected by having special clubs for, say, Honor Roll Students? That way, relative dullards would be able to take and even pass these classes, but they still wouldn't be good enough to belong in the elite.
Do you intend to reply to Ryan McMaken's article "Haiti: Why Open Borders Don’t Work in the Developing World"? Maybe in the future, I reply to this article.
Talking about immigration, I am doing some research about German immigration to Brazil, since I am a German Brazilian. My great-great-grandfather came during the 1820s to fight in the Cisplatine War as Dom Pedro I mercenary.
To paraphrase Milton Friedman: though an open-borders immigration policy may prove advantageous for a host country's current inhabitants if immigrants must fend for themselves, accepting all comers when substantial benefits are available to them at public expense is a very different kettle of fish.
Is there a hard cap on welfare expenditure in Hawaii?? If not, the ones who get the short end of the stick are taxpayers rather than other welfare-eligible indigents.
The COFA acronym meant nothing to me, but I've learned from Googling that it refers to a pledge by the US government to grant funds for the welfare of the native populations of the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and the Republic of Palau. So US taxpayers have been on the hook for them whether or not they immigrate to the US. The open-ended funding commitments were cut short, however; instead, the US established trust funds with one-time donations, to be managed and disbursed by the governments of the COFA countries, beginning in 1997 for Palau and in 2024 for the FSM and RMI. https://www.doi.gov/oia/compact-trust-funds Sounds good, but the attempt to curtail US expenditure for the welfare of COFA natives will ultimately prove futile if the door remains wide open for COFA immigrants after the trust funds are exhausted.
I wouldn't count on it, but maybe between now and 2045 there'll be a sea change in mainstream US culture that'll leave woke-progressivism and any associated sense of guilty obligation to third-world people of color in the wastebasket of history. Possibly as a side effect of a catastrophic collapse of the US economy brought about by further prolongation of the Federal government's unbridled profligacy.
But they have enough melanin to qualify as People of Color, don't they? That's huge.
Another, and even bigger, problem that no prominent US politician has ever acknowledged, AFAIK, is dysgenic fertility. Today it occurred to me that the problem could be redressed by political means without curtailing anyone's reproductive freedom, but I don't think there's much chance of it being done.
It sounds sophisticated but it boils down to "when there is a common interest that people’s individual actions don’t necessarily maximize, I think that there is a role for the government is to make good “trades” to maximize this common interest (and not make the bad trades)"
Much of the case for open borders by Bryan is questioning that the government should make these choices, both from a moral and and economic efficiency perspective
That doesn't mean nobody makes these choices (e.g. adverse selection decisions are done by private organisations, businesses, landlords, individuals).
Where Bryan's case is challenging is when people don't see past the premise above of "government should organise common interest" (at which level of government? size? and people just assume it's the nation state or the US federal government).
He's trying to give people good reasons that makes it fit into their way of thinking, but that's eventually where people find inconsistencies or aren't able to grasp with the full idea.
Now use this line of logic to argue for limiting voluntary births from U.S. citizens. If that makes you uncomfortable, you've stumbled on the inherent prejudice of immigration restrictions and the arguments that justify them.
Immigrants self select and the gain in income is an important reason to immigrate. That does not go away with open borders. Part of the answer is that like newborn natives, who can be costly and risky to society too, immigrants have a right to tolerance. Part of the answer is the keyhole solution of an immigration tax, because it keeps immigrants with small gains out, while compensating for the more costly ones.
I cannot take such scenarios seriously. Why would the UN do that? When did anything like this ever happen? The example you gave before of states cycling out their homeless is more realistic, but not a big deal and no reason to close borders between the states.
This is silly because why would the Syrian go to Germany first if he could go to the US? Either he prefers Germany and can get there as well, or he goes to the US straight away.
Exile of an entire people was not extremely common historically. Closing the border now, on the off chance that it might happen again soon is nuts. If there is no better solution, you can always close the border when it happens.
Note that a migration tax would help against the outlandish schemes you fear, and would bring revenue where restrictions only have costs.
Does this argument assume people get to stay even if they have no job and are living from crime or government benefits? If not then I don't think the analogy to buying stocks holds. If so, I don't think thats what Brian advocates.
Is the marginal value of the immigrant to the US more or less than had the immigrant stayed in home country, added productivity, and created demand for US exports?
This is a great demonstration of why the moral argument has to be primary. The bottom line is that human beings should be free to identify and pursue their rational values and achieve their best life in the place where they're most able to do that by their own judgment. What that means for any country's economy is secondary, although the fact is that the more productive people a country attracts, the better off it'll be.
This is a good point but it’s not adverse selection, it is simply that the current marginal high skill immigrant is net good whereas if we expanded immigration a lot then the counterfactual marginal immigrant would be substantially different and probably substantially worse. It is not that the worst people choose to immigrate (at least legally) but that actually the best do currently but that would change if we moved the margin. The implication being that we should cautiously permit more high skill immigration but stop before the point where we are legally allowing the sorts that are currently asylum seekers (which obviously should be halted).
I think that part of the explanation for why the counterfactual marginal immigrant with expanded immigration would be substantially worse *is* adverse selection. When you reduce the degree to which you vet offers, you should expect the (marginal) proportion of instances of adverse selection to increase, since vetting is the one lever you have available to pull to decrease adverse selection.
Put another way: I think an essential lesson of adverse selection is "the person who is putting an offer on the book (the market maker) is at a disadvantage because the people looking at the book (the market takers) can see the offer and decide (with the information that the offer is on the book) whether to take it or not.” This is why you should always expect market makers to show spreads; it’s also the advantage of being “in position” in poker. But if you’re the taker, you give up this “taker’s advantage” if your strategy for taking is "lift every offer on the book" (much like how you don’t have an advantage “in position” if your strategy is to call everything). If that is your strategy (and if it is well-known that that is your strategy), then you're the one who is extremely vulnerable to adverse selection, because your strategy is equivalent to putting a permanent bid of +infinity on the book!
(This is adapted from an email I wrote to Prof. Caplan expanding slightly on my post above.)
I find it commendable that Bryan goes out of his way to share high quality rebuttals to his arguments with his audience.
This is reasonable. Emigration is happening in multiple countries and they are all offering different deals, and so it's a dynamic game with different effects on different players. Our current system is let people who don't respect rules in, or patient and people with the ability to and luck to get through the bureaucracy seems like we're not playing the best strategy. I take Brian's moral arguments seriously, and wish to live in a world in which people can move more freely, but you need to acknowledge that some folks have negative value and one goal of our system is to ensuring we have as few of those as possible. One by not letting them in, and two through creating a united culture that makes it makes it unlikely people born here become negative in terms of value.
My synthesis of Bryan and Garret jones is we can let as many people as possible who produce positive value, as long as we can create rules that accomdiate growth easily.
The other issue with Bryans arguments is that it justifies colonialism. Would Mexico be as rich as the US if we just took over and imposed our rules instead of theirs? If yes than immigration isn't needed, if no, then why would you assume immigration of their entire population add value? You can't have it both ways. I can see some ways to reslove this, but not many
Open Borders Advocates: I have given you a bunch of chocolates as a gift. It is impolite not to eat them all.
Me: I'm badly allergic to certain nuts, so I'm just going to eat the ones without them.
Open Borders Advocates: Bigot!
Longer version: https://www.academia.edu/38936607/The_Liberal_Defense_of_Immigration_Control
Mexico is already composed of 31 states, and it wouldn't make much sense to have a single state that is more than 3 times more populous than California, so probably the 51st through 81st states. Mexicans would be almost 40% of the Senate and almost 30% of the House of Representatives and electoral votes for President. So how much would the post-annexation country be similar to the pre-annexation country, and how much would it be similar to Mexico as it is now? So colonialism is probably more justifiable.
In general, the larger the deviation one makes from the status quo, the more unpredictable the results. I would like to believe that we could move to something close to open borders. But my Burkean side says to proceed gradually. Radical proposals often make useful thought experiments, but I don’t trust them to work out in practice.
I think a stronger version of Bryan’s argument is something like: Here are a bunch of reasons why open borders could work out really well. Let’s take some incremental steps in that direction and see how it goes. If things go well, we’ll move further. If unexpected problems arise, let’s figure out how to mitigate them before pushing further.
It seems unclear to me what would count as gradual here. The obvious candidate is to let in a few more people legally, by increasing quotas or lowering restrictions. But would this signal cause the current stream of illegal entry to shift to legal entry? Or would it encourage even more illegal entry? If the policy seems permanent, it lowers the cost of legal entry, meaning more persons would tend to choose it, but it isn’t clear that it would not also increase demand generally, with unclear effects on illegal entry. If it is credibly temporary, with ever less restrictive policies on the horizon, does that cause people to want to wait enough to have the desired effect? I’m not sure.
Would anything else count as “gradual”? What is a good way to ease into having more immigration, while reserving the ability to reverse the policy if things don’t work out?
I would like to see Bryan engaging with I/o on X, who is a data oriented account that holds the centrist position on immigration, which is that some immigrant groups are a net positive and others a net negative, increasing disorder and not successfully becoming productive. I/o specifically points to Muslim immigration in Europe as an example of an “open borders” style policy that has gone poorly for host countries. I think Bryan addresses this concern by saying that host countries should simply not extend benefits and ??? For the disorder. It’s not a convincing response and doesn’t seem thought through. A debate on X would be interesting.
BTW: 2 people arrive in America and intend to stay: one by crossing the border, the other by emerging from a birth canal. Both will be "competing for jobs". Why do we think they are so different?
Read https://www.robkhenderson.com/p/the-rise-of-western-individualism.
WEIRD (Western, Educated, individualized, rich, democratic) culture is very different from other cultures around the world, so someone born into it would be very different from someone who migrated.
One relevant difference is that WEIRD culture is more likely to play fair with a set of rules, and non WEIRD culture is more likely to subvert them. There are socio-economic reasons of course for this difference but it highlights the fact that yes, the two people you mentioned are different in ways that will affect the culture of society.
Yet many American citizens hate America and take freedom for granted. While immigrants are self selected to love American. I am one of those immigrants.
Don't all of the open borders arguments apply to public university admission? Why does Caplan fully endorse highly selective capped admission for public/government universities? If government said anyone was allowed to walk into a public university and pay full tuition to take a math or engineering class and get whatever grade they get, what is the libertarian argument against that?
Tyler Cowen says selective capped university admission is important for social cohesion, "[an elite university class] is supposed to be cohesive rather than anonymous, more like a memorable social event than a visit to a giant retail warehouse." and to protect the culture of the social elites: "start with the general point that social elites need to replicate themselves, one way or another. Otherwise they tend to fade away;"
These arguments that Tyler Cowen makes in defense of selective capped elite university admission sound exactly like the arguments made for highly restrictive immigration policy: we want to protect our culture, our legacy, and enhance social cohesion.
Can't the culture of the social elites be protected by having special clubs for, say, Honor Roll Students? That way, relative dullards would be able to take and even pass these classes, but they still wouldn't be good enough to belong in the elite.
Do you intend to reply to Ryan McMaken's article "Haiti: Why Open Borders Don’t Work in the Developing World"? Maybe in the future, I reply to this article.
Talking about immigration, I am doing some research about German immigration to Brazil, since I am a German Brazilian. My great-great-grandfather came during the 1820s to fight in the Cisplatine War as Dom Pedro I mercenary.
Merry Christmas!
To paraphrase Milton Friedman: though an open-borders immigration policy may prove advantageous for a host country's current inhabitants if immigrants must fend for themselves, accepting all comers when substantial benefits are available to them at public expense is a very different kettle of fish.
For details, see https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/sorry-but-illegal-aliens-cost-the-u-s-plenty/ and the graph captioned Figure 2.1 in this blog post: https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/somalis-in-the-usa-also-not-a-success
Is there a hard cap on welfare expenditure in Hawaii?? If not, the ones who get the short end of the stick are taxpayers rather than other welfare-eligible indigents.
The COFA acronym meant nothing to me, but I've learned from Googling that it refers to a pledge by the US government to grant funds for the welfare of the native populations of the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and the Republic of Palau. So US taxpayers have been on the hook for them whether or not they immigrate to the US. The open-ended funding commitments were cut short, however; instead, the US established trust funds with one-time donations, to be managed and disbursed by the governments of the COFA countries, beginning in 1997 for Palau and in 2024 for the FSM and RMI. https://www.doi.gov/oia/compact-trust-funds Sounds good, but the attempt to curtail US expenditure for the welfare of COFA natives will ultimately prove futile if the door remains wide open for COFA immigrants after the trust funds are exhausted.
I wouldn't count on it, but maybe between now and 2045 there'll be a sea change in mainstream US culture that'll leave woke-progressivism and any associated sense of guilty obligation to third-world people of color in the wastebasket of history. Possibly as a side effect of a catastrophic collapse of the US economy brought about by further prolongation of the Federal government's unbridled profligacy.
But they have enough melanin to qualify as People of Color, don't they? That's huge.
Another, and even bigger, problem that no prominent US politician has ever acknowledged, AFAIK, is dysgenic fertility. Today it occurred to me that the problem could be redressed by political means without curtailing anyone's reproductive freedom, but I don't think there's much chance of it being done.
It sounds sophisticated but it boils down to "when there is a common interest that people’s individual actions don’t necessarily maximize, I think that there is a role for the government is to make good “trades” to maximize this common interest (and not make the bad trades)"
Much of the case for open borders by Bryan is questioning that the government should make these choices, both from a moral and and economic efficiency perspective
That doesn't mean nobody makes these choices (e.g. adverse selection decisions are done by private organisations, businesses, landlords, individuals).
Where Bryan's case is challenging is when people don't see past the premise above of "government should organise common interest" (at which level of government? size? and people just assume it's the nation state or the US federal government).
He's trying to give people good reasons that makes it fit into their way of thinking, but that's eventually where people find inconsistencies or aren't able to grasp with the full idea.
Now use this line of logic to argue for limiting voluntary births from U.S. citizens. If that makes you uncomfortable, you've stumbled on the inherent prejudice of immigration restrictions and the arguments that justify them.
American Renaissance man Jared Taylor actually does advocate in favor of making LARC (Norplant) usage a precondition for welfare access.
"Lift" an "offer"? I lack some terminology here.
Immigrants self select and the gain in income is an important reason to immigrate. That does not go away with open borders. Part of the answer is that like newborn natives, who can be costly and risky to society too, immigrants have a right to tolerance. Part of the answer is the keyhole solution of an immigration tax, because it keeps immigrants with small gains out, while compensating for the more costly ones.
A free one way ticket is insignificant compared to multiplying income for most people. Those homeless won't be a big deal.
I cannot take such scenarios seriously. Why would the UN do that? When did anything like this ever happen? The example you gave before of states cycling out their homeless is more realistic, but not a big deal and no reason to close borders between the states.
This is silly because why would the Syrian go to Germany first if he could go to the US? Either he prefers Germany and can get there as well, or he goes to the US straight away.
Exile of an entire people was not extremely common historically. Closing the border now, on the off chance that it might happen again soon is nuts. If there is no better solution, you can always close the border when it happens.
Note that a migration tax would help against the outlandish schemes you fear, and would bring revenue where restrictions only have costs.
Does this argument assume people get to stay even if they have no job and are living from crime or government benefits? If not then I don't think the analogy to buying stocks holds. If so, I don't think thats what Brian advocates.
Is the marginal value of the immigrant to the US more or less than had the immigrant stayed in home country, added productivity, and created demand for US exports?
Less if institutions in the U.S. make one more productive in the U.S. than elsewhere
This is a great demonstration of why the moral argument has to be primary. The bottom line is that human beings should be free to identify and pursue their rational values and achieve their best life in the place where they're most able to do that by their own judgment. What that means for any country's economy is secondary, although the fact is that the more productive people a country attracts, the better off it'll be.
This is a good point but it’s not adverse selection, it is simply that the current marginal high skill immigrant is net good whereas if we expanded immigration a lot then the counterfactual marginal immigrant would be substantially different and probably substantially worse. It is not that the worst people choose to immigrate (at least legally) but that actually the best do currently but that would change if we moved the margin. The implication being that we should cautiously permit more high skill immigration but stop before the point where we are legally allowing the sorts that are currently asylum seekers (which obviously should be halted).
I think that part of the explanation for why the counterfactual marginal immigrant with expanded immigration would be substantially worse *is* adverse selection. When you reduce the degree to which you vet offers, you should expect the (marginal) proportion of instances of adverse selection to increase, since vetting is the one lever you have available to pull to decrease adverse selection.
Put another way: I think an essential lesson of adverse selection is "the person who is putting an offer on the book (the market maker) is at a disadvantage because the people looking at the book (the market takers) can see the offer and decide (with the information that the offer is on the book) whether to take it or not.” This is why you should always expect market makers to show spreads; it’s also the advantage of being “in position” in poker. But if you’re the taker, you give up this “taker’s advantage” if your strategy for taking is "lift every offer on the book" (much like how you don’t have an advantage “in position” if your strategy is to call everything). If that is your strategy (and if it is well-known that that is your strategy), then you're the one who is extremely vulnerable to adverse selection, because your strategy is equivalent to putting a permanent bid of +infinity on the book!
(This is adapted from an email I wrote to Prof. Caplan expanding slightly on my post above.)