(a) welfare state, (b) the sheer scale, (c) one political party stands to gain almost all these newcomers as their voters, (d) related to b, the scale allows and encourages lack of assimilation, (e) terrorism, (f) look at western Europe, (g) there's more to a country than its economics, and (h) even at that, the free market system itself is not a given, (i) the culture of a country is a function of the people who live there - if we like our culture more than the culture of those coming... do the math.
I'm one of the people not willing to take the time. I've yet to see a concise summary of how our culture could not be radically changed by a doubling or tripling of population from countries that don't share our core values. Nor explanations of practical implementation - how do we prevent an actual invasion? Can the Chinese government send people by the 10's or hundreds of millions with instructions to disrupt us and make our institutions subservient to the Chinese government?
I own all of Caplan's work and would argue I have seen almost every talk he has given that anyone took time to record. He has a blind spot to politics. For instance if you have a nation of one billion people it is a very small investment to send enough people to another country to completely change their political leadership and politics.
Bryan likes taking bets, I have a bet for him, he forms a company and puts any income he or his family makes into a shared trust that votes on how all funds are dispersed, then the allows anyone who wants to to simply join the company, contribute all their income into the company and get an even vote of how the money is dispersed.
Do you think Professor Caplan and his family would have a higher or lower quality of life after two years of this?
I bet $100 dollars he would end up having almost no money after 2 years. People without jobs would join the Caplan nation, vote to disperse themselves funds while adding no funds.
He can read all the statistics and bad studies done on this topic, but any attempt to create a testable situation will always end up with this not working out. If open borders worked and always paid off than every company should accept every employee who shows up and asks for a job because the company would just endlessly grow because there is a net benefit and no limit.
I love the way you keep citing culture. That is the blind spot of any libertarian promotion of open borders. (I'd forget about the China angle, though; that only appeals to conservatives)
You think that's their blind spot? Their entire ideology is a blind spot. Ask them what they're doing to prevent anti-BDS laws from being passed. Or where they are on the "antisemitism" bills that are spreading, starting with South Dakota. These are explicitly against the First Amendment. They're not too loud when it comes to those things. Wonder why?
Not to mention they seem to think private property is the end all be all of life, and the Civil Rights Act has prevented PRIVATE BUSINESS OWNERS from discriminating based on race. Why shouldn't private businesses be able to discriminate based on any reason they want? That's been law since 1964. Where are they on that? Where are they when a business owner didn't want to accept a mentally ill man dressing like a woman to go to work? He went to the Supreme Court and won on that. Where were they then?
These people are worthless. They can defend child pornography for hours, and defend open borders for the goyim while Israel gets nothing but secure borders, and they think they're intellectuals. It's fucking pathetic. Caplan is the best example of this idiotic nonsense.
As far as I am aware, no, actually. He's discussed exceptions before, and I think the situation in Israel is one of them. But that doesn't mean that they shouldn't have open borders with certain countries.
He thinks open borders are great for the goyim because reasons, but when it comes to something he actually cares about and wants to preserve, like his people's ethnostate, then it's an exception!
Well, isn't that remarkable! Certain countries should accept the third world human detritus, the crime especially sexual crime against women, the illiterate peasants, the strain on social services, the depressed wages, the benefit to the 1% who want cheap maids and gardeners, and the screams of racism (from primarily guess who--they have something in common with ol' Caplan here) from anyone who points this out, but Israel gets nothing but closed borders!
You people are worthless. Shut up. You can't stop people from noticing. It's too far gone.
He's already written a book on it that isn't a long read. Why should he lay out all of his arguments again?
As far as your China scenario, it's far too outlandish and likely wouldn't work like that in the real world. The Chinese government isn't an ultra-competent ultra-rich supervillain able to force 10s of millions to do its bidding. How does it get them to follow its orders? Even then, the US can just ban immigrants from China and open the border to everyone else. Problem solved. This small and unlikely problem isn't worth a massive immigration bureaucracy.
what? I don't really understand your argument. None of these advanced data sets studied in an AC office at the union guaranteed job survive any obvious testing.
Lets say you live in State A and you actually like your culture and your way of life. In your State if you had say $50,000 that will fund a middle class life for 50 years.
You learn that State B, has free food banks, places to sleep for free, and if you go there and are willing to live a terrible life for 4 years you can easily make $50,000.
Do you feel bad that you will never pay into State Bs system that makes the charity and social benefits possible? Nope.
No more than people feel bad about it if they have a job they get paid well for even if they know they have no productive purpose at the job.
He hasn't looked at any of the studies on the amount of CASH that is flowing directly from high immigration areas back to home countries.
I didn’t mention China, but my comment was aimed at getting him to try to actually convince his own readers in an open dialogue. I am quite familiar with his arguments, and find them overly theoretical, idealistic, and less than convincing.
Open borders destroy a country and its economy, due to depressed wages and skyrocketing housing costs, not to mention the destruction of the native population's culture and population numbers. In the UK particularly they have a huge problem with Muslim rape gangs. It's happening in Sweden, the UK, Germany.
Mr. Caplan knows that. That's why he pushes it, and he has a personal reason for it because many of the people pushing for open borders for the goyim, while securing borders for Israel, are aware of what they're doing.
He refutes it based on average studies and if you read a case against education you might learn there is a bit of a problem with a lot of studies, as you can basically form the study to get the results you want.
How do you refute for instance,
The immigration of Europeans dramatically changed the culture of the Americas. From my point of view it was a good change, but I think it is pretty well established that the native Americans saw it as a bad change.
Or lets look at a country that throughout it's history has a long standing track record of being against immigration.
Japan, I will not sit here and argue that Japan is dramatically better than any country, I would say they do pretty well. Generally better than U.S. in life expectancy, debt to income ratio, healthcare, education, crime and so on, but not some enormous difference.
So my point isn't that Japan is dramatically better, but if open borders and immigration is so incredibly beneficial why is Japan doing quite well. They are a country that is basically all native born citizens and close to completely of one race.
If we are to believe that diversity and immigration has enormous benefits, shouldn't we have left Japan in the dust?
Are Zenophobic countries actually performing worse? Sweden and Germany for instance?
Truth is Caplan is a really smart guy who can sometimes operate in a vacuum and makes assumptions about how quickly a country or politics can change. He assumes the trend will continue.
Basically ignoring distant history where massive immigration literally destroyed nations, not because the immigrants were bad, but because systems can collapse under too much change.
If all those things are a problem then regardless of immigration you need to find a solution, because millions of native-born Americans are "migrating" to bad politics all on their own. If you can't find a way to reverse that, then even if you stopped immigration entirely, native-born Americans with bad politics are going to do all those bad things anyway.
Only the "one party" thing is fully political. And despite the massive differences we see between parties, we still have near consensus in this country about some basics like rule of law, the value of markets, status of women, free speech and general enlightenment values (though I agree there is a disturbing trend on the far left away from many of these core values). If you consider the plight of western Europe in light if immigration from the middle east - there is little common ground and their immigration policy is pretty clearly suicidal to their western culture.
You can assert these things, but I'm going to need to see real data on the negative effects on western culture between immigrants and non-immigrants. Is Western Europe truly "in plight" as a result of this, in the way that is worse than say, native Marxist terrorist organizations from the 70s, conducting weekly bombings? Are their societies really committing suicide in a way that is dependent on immigration?
I am not arguing that there aren't negative effects, but I am gonna need to see some numbers - and those numbers need to highlight how the native-born citizens of those countries aren't ALSO believing and doing bad things too.
In every situation, "lots of people believe really stupid shit" is the real problem. When people try to fix that problem with "so we'll kick out all the immigrants who believe stupid shit" then I wonder, "what about all the native idiots?" If you don't also have a plan to persuade (or politically defang) the native idiots, who will happily impose (and literally, already have done so, before the immigrants arrived) all the bad consequences of believing stupid shit on your country, then what's the point? "Society has collapsed, but at least we have no immigrants!" And if you do have a plan to persuade people, then just deploy it against both natives and immigrants.
We need to assimilate people from the Land of Believing Stupid Shit into the Nation of Politics That Work, but that needs to be done to natives AND immigrants, because there are way more natives who are already here, believing stupid shit, and enshrining it in stupid laws and policies.
I'm not sure there's data to be had. You could attempt to look at GDP per capita or something, but I'm also talking about culture. Do you want to live in Afghanistan? Why not? Is it just because they are poor (I doubt it)? And why do you suppose they are poor anyway? Was it just thrust upon them by cruel fate, or is it more likely a function of the culture and attitudes of the people there? If you triple the population of Lichtenstein (or some random small wealthy European country) by importing people from Afghanistan, do you think that country would maintain its average standard of living? Would the people there be just as happy after all their institutions are taken over by former Afghans? I have no data to answer any of this, but most of the answer seem clear to me. I suspect the same is true for most others, and the onus is on the mass open immigration people to explain in clear terms why our intuition is false.
Is your argument that there are no significant cultural differences between countries and that if there are there is no arguably good or bad cultures. So if there were 1 billion Nazis you would be cool if 10% of them came to the United States making us 33% Nazis? There would be no danger there.
Do you not believe that people inherently carry their culture with them despite their intent?
Is it not possible that people fleeing failed states might actually be the people that made it a failed state? You believe they are fleeing the bad policies and thus would be open minded to our beliefs but what if in fact they are the ones who made the terrible policies that bankrupted the country and are now also the ones not willing to make the country better.
We basically can't compare the America and it's immigration of any time pre FDR to post FDR. Pre FDR if you chose to come to America you might literally starve, you would do anything to make a living and feed yourself. The America post FDR there is zero risk of starvation, zero risk of basically being forced into a coal mine, no chance you'll have to die on the way to your plot of land out west.
Now you would be leaving a much more risky situation to come to a much less risky situation.
That means you are not getting the innovators and risk takers necessarily.
> I'm going to need to see real data on the negative effects on western culture between immigrants and non-immigrants.
I'm not sure exactly how you might define "negative effects," and I don't want to spend all day chasing around the internet to find the specific kinds of evidence you may allow as showing something that any sensible person would regard as obvious, but here:
Howley, P., Waqas, M., Moro, M., Delaney, L., & Heron, T. (2020). It’s not all about the economy stupid! Immigration and subjective well-being in England. Work, Employment and Society, 34(5), 919-936.
"By exploiting spatial and temporal variation in the net-inflows of foreign-born individuals across local areas in England, we examine the relationship between immigration and natives’ subjective well-being as captured by the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ). We find small negative effects overall but that an analysis of main effects masks significant differences across sub-groups with relatively older individuals, those with below average household incomes, the unemployed and finally those without any formal educational qualifications experiencing much more substantive well-being losses than others. These observed well-being differentials are congruent with voting patterns evident in the recent UK referendum on EU membership. We put forward perceived as opposed to actual labour market competition and social identity as two potential explanations for the negative well-being impacts of immigration for natives."
In other words, immigration has a negative impact on the happiness of natives, which is most pronounced on the lower class. But in case you don't really care about the well being of the lower class we find plenty of other evidence that immigration is bad for culture. For example:
Lancee, B., & Dronkers, J. (2008, May). Ethnic diversity in neighborhoods and individual trust of immigrants and natives: A replication of Putnam (2007) in a West-European country. In international conference on theoretical perspectives on social cohesion and social capital, Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts, Brussels (pp. 77-103).
"With data from the Netherlands (N=5,757), using multi-level regression, we confirm Putnam’s claim and find that both for immigrants and native residents 1) neighborhoods’ ethnic diversity reduces individual trust in neighborhoods; 2) those with neighbors of a different ethnicity have less trust in neighborhoods and neighbors 3) a substantial part of the effect of neighborhoods’ ethnic diversity on individual trust can be explained by the higher propensity of having neighbors of a different ethnicity. We conclude that ethnic diversity can have a negative effect on individual trust."
Ultimately there's an enormous research stream on the subject, which is in some ways surprising. Given that immigration has been championed by the establishment for decades, now, there is an obvious bias against finding and reporting that immigration erodes trust and human happiness.
So it's a matter of indifference to you how many Islamists -- people impelled by a superstitious sense of obligation to do whatever they can to undermine constitutional democracy and promote establishment of Islamic theocracy and Sharia law instead -- take up residence in this country?
I completely agree, but I think it's fair to ask: is the immigration the problem or is it the way the government handled it (welfare to immigrants, not penalizing bad apples, etc)?
It's not a few bad apples. It's the destruction of the society by destroying its population.
Immigration, all of it from legal to illegal, is the problem. Open borders is the quickest way to destroy a society. That's why libertardians like Bryan Caplan oppose it for Israel.
Because the same people who did what happened to Sweden and France are the same people who are doing it to the US. They have the same goal, and they all have something in common with Mr. Caplan here. You'll never guess what it is. Alejandro Mayorkas (hey wait a minute!) is presiding over an open border as we speak.
Ask if they want open borders for Israel. You'll be astonished by the inconsistency, truly!
No - more like, "I don't want to look like a Trump supporter."
The trouble is that the bigoted and irrational case against immigration is so loud; people are negatively suggestible by bad arguments, and don't want to be associated with anybody who makes them. In order for the majority to be *able* to believe something, it has to seem both educated and not mean.
I assume what you mean by "the bigoted and irrational case against immigration" is a bigoted and irrational argument for a more restrictive immigration policy -- since neither Donald Trump nor, AFAIK, any other prominent politician or widely-followed polemicist has advocated a complete ban on further immigration. But if that understanding is correct I'm not sure which restrictionist argument it is that you deem bigoted and irrational. Please elaborate.
It isn't that any policy is bigoted or irrational. It's that some people are more bigoted and irrational than others, and these people gravitate towards certain positions because of their intuitive, emotional reactions. Then moderates and leftists see them doing this, and start to associate the positions themselves with narrow-mindedness.
Yes but the historical eras of mass immigration also had much less in the way of transfer payments and government benefits. Immigrants who want to come here and work? Do landscaping? Open restaurants? Start businesses? Grand. Immigrants who are allowed in and given free housing and debit cards and food aid and plane tickets and healthcare? Not so grand.
American politics has changed a lot in the past two decades (never mind the past century) and the people who are often most pro-open borders are simultaneously often the people who want free college and single-payer healthcare and rent subsidies for all comers. You don't have to be Stephen Hawking to understand this will NOT work.
And somewhere around 1/3 of immigrants FAILED to thrive in the USA, tucked their tails between their legs, and returned to the old country. That's no longer the fate of failed immigrants...the USA owns (owes) them and their progeny forever.
While I agree with your general viewpoint, what does the data look like on immigrants and transfer payments? Given that the vast majority of transfer payments in this country go to old, retired citizens (who have been here for... quite some time indeed), I find it hard to blame immigrants for this problem.
You're ignoring who actually pays for mass immigration (hint: it's not primarily government).
Mass unskilled immigration causes depressed wage levels (see Borjas) and decreased opportunities for young and working class Americans to develop work habits and seek gainful employment (just look around you). Unless of course it's true that "there's work Americans just won't do" and "everyone should go to college or learn to code."
even Borjas' most compelling results only found like, a decrease in a few % points in wages, in a single labor sector. Yes, obviously labor competition exists and greater supply would lead to lower wages, but it's just not that big an effect.
"decreased opportunities for young and working class Americans to develop work habits and seek gainful employment (just look around you)."
It's fine to believe that but... wouldn't our recent periods of high immigration have resulted in high unemployment today? Do we have low employment or (non-inflation-based) wage stagnation? Are higher unemployment levels correlated with places that have had more immigration?
"You're ignoring who actually pays for mass immigration (hint: it's not primarily government)."
Okay, fine, but then I get to count the non-govt people also reap rewards from mass immigration, from renting apartments to them, employing them, selling things to them, or purchasing things created by their labor - but the guy I was responding to was complaining about transfer payments by the government. And if you're worried about the gov going broke giving money to people, it's the old non-immigrants that you are worried about.
I am fine with people arguing that immigration has costs that need to be accounted for in assessing if we need more or less, but if I'm going to be persuaded of a position, I need the arguments for it to make sense, otherwise I'm going to be anti-persuaded and support more immigration.
The case looks something like this. Low skill immigrant groups are flat to negative during their prime working years and strongly negative outside of them. They aren't saving anyones fiscal cliff.
It's not about blame. I'm saying that the policy calculus of immigration has changed from a country of free markets, stable jobs, and healthy communities to one of widespread public social spending. While most FEDERAL payments do indeed go to older Americans (citizens, mostly) that ignores the public policy WISHES of the people on the Left. Many Americans now want free healthcare and education for all residents. That is also something that has to be factored in to the immigration debate. If cities are going to publicly support waves of immigrants that is a factor that should be factored into the conversation. It was not the case in the 19th century-everyone made their own money and relied upon charity and family to fill the gaps. It is the case now, and all of those trends are moving in a consistent direction. I don't blame immigrants for wanting to come here and I don't blame voters who want open borders and free healthcare/housing/wage support of anything, except rank stupidity and a profound ignorance of policy realities and economics.
Sure, ok, but then we still have one problem: we currently have, regardless of immigration, unsustainable math re: workers vs transfer recipients. Sure, maybe a large influx of retired immigrants might make it worse, but we're talking accelerating the fiscal disaster by a few years. It is not reassuring to me that if we Stop Immigration, we destroy the country in 2042 instead of 2041. (And immigrants being mostly working age people likely means that effect isn't that strong)
You need to fix that one problem, whether or not you fix immigration. People focus negatively on immigration because it gets the politics blood pumping, but it's precisely for that reason that you have to focus on the actual, underlying problem. A fiscal disaster with immigrants is largely the same to me as a fiscal disaster without immigrants.
I'm not arguing that immigrants are going to break the bank. I'm saying that a societies with radically different forms of social support and employment and community will integrate newcomers differently. Just as Britain has had issues assimilating their immigrants because of ghettoization and religious extremism and public welfare, our domestic circumstances will change how we integrate immigrants. So far we seem quite good at assimilation but that could change if we become the society with free college and healthcare and rent support and high taxes that many progressives want us to be. In any case, the comparison that the author made between the millions of immigrants who arrived from 1700-1900 and the immigrants who are arriving now is imperfect. My reply was meant to point out why it was imperfect. It's not that immigrants will bankrupt us. It's that a country with low housing stock and a rigid labor market and high taxes and low business formation rates will NOT process newcomers in the way that 1900's New York City did. Those factors lead to more crime, more insularity, more social problems, and less assimilation. Identity politics certainly doesn't help either, in my opinion.
You seem to agree that someone born in America and someone born outside should have equal rights to get a job or start a business in America. So why do they not also have equal rights to receive American welfare? What makes the American-born recipient more deserving?
Overall your argument seems more anti-welfare than anti-immigration, except that you only apply your logic to immigrants and don't apply the same reasoning to people born in the USA.
In reality of course, some immigrants would live on welfare but most would get jobs, and the rich ones would subsidise the poor ones. A bit like how a welfare system already works, in fact.
Nobody has a right to a job or a business or welfare. I never mentioned rights at all, I don't think. I support a social system where people are free to start businesses and get jobs because I believe the public policy arguments are sound. In a utilitarian sense, an arrangement like that yields the most freedom and comfort and wealth.
Most people will only get jobs if the welfare system if appropriately sparse and minimal, and the welfare system only works if the economy is producing enough wealth to subsidize the recipients. That might be a given in a stable and rich economy with a standard demographic profile but probably wouldn't be at all times and in all places. Imagine a reunified Korean peninsula in 20 years with generous social supports. I think that situation would almost certainly tip their boat. It's an open question whether even our current outlays are going to 'work' long term, even though they're limited to certain age and income groups and usually only available to citizens.
In a country with generous rent support and food and childcare assistance most people will take advantage of those benefits, if they can.
I wasn't arguing for or against immigration. If you go back and read my reply you will see that.
Yes, I agree. Again: I wasn’t arguing against immigration. The fact that we HAVE welfare, and the fact that a large percentage of our voters want to dramatically expand the type and scope of our programs, should be included in conversations about the pros and cons of immigration. The nature of entitlement programs have changed and so have our cultural attitudes towards them and those changes will have implications for the way we integrate immigrants and the costs/benefits of admitting them. As I already wrote: if the people who WANT open immigration were also the people who generally favor limiting welfare our prospects would be better. But in many cases we have voters supporting effectively open borders while also promoting dramatic expansions of federal entitlement spending. Combining these two policy objectives would lead to problems.
Welfare State or Open Borders - choose one. Because our Welfare State is a political third rail and will remain with us for the remainder of the American Empire, then immigration should be restricted to those with the means to self-insure against dependency via bond, or else have an employer or sponsor (family or friend) post a dependency bond on their behalf.
the welfare state, even with just native-born Americans in the mix, is already a math nightmare over the next few decades. You assert "we have to pick one" but then immediately say that one cannot be unpicked. But if it truly can't, then we're screwed anyway. You'll still have roving bands of young people killing old people for voting for the 75% SS/M tax rates on them. But at least none of them will be immigrants.
I think excluding immigrants from the majority of transfer payments is a great idea, but the math of the welfare state in the US is that the vast majority of transfers go to old native-born people, [edit] and even without changing any law about "who gets transfer payments", immigrants would be eligible for far, far less than "retired Americans."
Brian. Love you man, you do amazing work. Just in case you read the comments this time, you lost your opponents in the first sentence. My ancestors have never been immigrants. They were conquerors and colonizers, and no we don't want someone doing the same to us.
Old fashioned conquerors like Cortez had to go to different countries and take over the people there. Modern-era conquerors made the process more efficient by having the conquered souls come to them.
What is shown in the post is the final result, the endgame, of high IQ and atheist intellectual thinking – the abstraction of everything until identity and uniqueness lose any significance. I call it: plasma destroyed the walls.
Just came here to say: I am amazed that Bryan said "I wrote a book on this, which most people are unwilling to read. Here is the demagogic case I would make if I were a demagogue" and then people in the comments say "What? Where is the argument?" and "I am not reading his book!"
> Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration is my most persuasive book.
That's too bad, because I'm really not persuaded. I realize that as an economist you're vested in looking at things economically. But your argument glosses over the importance of shared culture and values. You've described homogeneous areas dismissively elsewhere:
"Who wants to go and move to a part of the country with almost no immigrants? Places like that are boring. Maybe not just because they lack immigrants, but a conspicuous fact about the low-immigration areas of the country is that they’re just dull places to be."
But the story of my life belies this perspective. I lost my childhood home to waves of immigrants, and have moved more than once to escape the dysfunction of polyglot cities. My recent move to a "dull" small town in New England with almost no immigrants was especially timely, as it came only briefly before a mass shooting tore through the city we had all too recently called home.
My experience is not unique; the state with the most immigrants is California, and Californians are fleeing the state even as immigrants move in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_exodus . Maybe they all have your attitude that "whatever, I'll just leave." But most human beings don't have a rootless consumerist belief that everything is fungible, including the idea of home. Most people value their communities - and a good thing when they do, because when people care about their community, they pull together and form a shared culture. But America is coming apart because of the loss of its culture, and libertarian solutions which continue to fragment and weaken that culture are not solutions at all: https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/is-libertarianism-a-bad-idea
well, at least we can't say that you didn't warn us that it would be demagogic; but demagoguery is never a good brief for uncontrolled immigration. This is 2024, not 1824 or 1924. Although, as far as that goes, the 1924 Immigration Act was the best immigration bill we ever had - and the 1965 Immigration & Nationality Act ,the worst. If we brought back the 1924 model, we could have a unified country again. Since 1965, American society has come unglued. Back to the future!
I see a number of comments regarding America's "culture". It seems to me that the United States truly is a melting pot of people from different parts of the world already. We've seemed to do alright merging all different kinds of people. Not perfectly, mind you. But, we've done it and our culture appears intact to me.
1. What do you see as America's culture?
2. If the US increases immigration, what will be destroyed? The NFL? Taylor Swift? The Museum of Modern Art? The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?
The second set of questions I have is based on the Welfare State.
1. Don't we have safeguards in place to prohibit people who aren't entitled to state benefits?
American culture is a subset of western culture: enlightenment ideals of individual rights, logic and rationality, rule of law, women and minority rights, broadly Christian with separation of church and state. More specifically American: freedom of speech, strong emphasis on individual rights, broadly libertarian by world standards, entrepreneurial spirit, rural/outdoor/gun culture and 2nd Amendment. That's off the top of my head. I'm sure I missed things.
You may or may not be aware how massively different people are from this outside the west. There are some good books on the topic, especially related to research in psychology where they made broad claims about human nature based on western college students.
So, from your perspective, America is a culture of freedom. You can fill in the blanks with whatever freedom that is (speech, religion, opportunity, travel). Certainly people from different parts of the world have lived in different situations and different cultural values. That's understood. But, it's safe to say that they want something that either can't, or won't be met in their current countries.
My question is why do so many fear a more open immigration system? It seems to me, if you are coming here, you are coming here for freedom of opportunity, choice, and individuality. We've absorbed many from dozens of cultures; Japanese, Chinese, El Salvadoran, Mexican, Polish, German...you name it!
Those who want to prevent any new immigration are those that feel that they are entitled to whatever it is they, and their families, have received from this country and that no one else should receive those opportunities. We have systems and processes in place to ensure that folks don't receive certain financial benefits without being a citizen; including voting, social security, welfare, and more. But, there is a pathway if someone is so motivated to join the American collective.
We continue to walk the path to a more perfect union...
"But, it's safe to say that they want something that either can't, or won't be met in their current countries." Most often material well being and/or physical safety. I suggest they most often don't care or have opposing opinions on issues such as free speech. I'll sarcastically point out the way liberals from California move away from there because of the liberal policies, then vote to bring them about in their new home. Now multiply this by a factor of 10 or 100 in the case of Muslim immigrants to Europe.
I don't fear a "more open" immigration system. I fear "open borders" or uncontrolled borders.
"It seems to me, if you are coming here, you are coming here for freedom of opportunity, choice, and individuality." I disagree completely. Muslim immigrants to Europe are not coming for those things. They are coming to escape the hell holes they were in before, but they still bring their culture with them, which is nearly 100% in opposition to all the freedom things I listed. Most people (just like the Californians) can't see that the policies they support are the root cause of the problems they are fleeing.
"Those who want to prevent any new immigration are those that feel that they are entitled to whatever it is they, and their families, have received from this country and that no one else should receive those opportunities." False. What is it about this country that makes it great? Is it in the water? It's in the broad culture: markets, individuality, freedom. Those things are "free" in the sense that any country could adopt them if they wanted to. The countries these people are fleeing did not adopt them and thus are languishing. But it's naive to think that every immigrant fleeing a hell hole sees this big picture and is moving *because* of freedom and markets. They are moving because their current place sucks and the new place is wealthy and safe.
Have you seen the riots and recent protests by Muslims (in their Burkas) in London? Do those people look like they are there to assimilate into the western mindset and culture?
NIMBY-ism is strong in California. Especially in the home market.
"I don't fear a "more open" immigration system. I fear "open borders" or uncontrolled borders.", then let's start opening the gates and not build more "wall". Build a wall around entitlements.
Some of the arguments you are making are if we can't ensure they'll assimilate, we shouldn't allow them in here. We can reduce the chances of Muslim protests, but we can't eliminate the chance. If it's a case of elimination of problems, or ensuring we only get good immigrants, you are not for a "more open immigration system". It sounds like it, but it's not. There is quite a bit of that argument in this thread already from the "I was in 8th grade on 9/11" folks. I was too, and it scared the beejesus out of me like everyone else...especially when I got a call that my daughters' daycare was being closed.
But we must have an understanding that in a free country there is always an element of risk involved. Driving a car is risk. Having too much to drink is a risk. Eating too much hydrogenated fats are a risk. Owning a house in a flood zone or a hurricane zone is a risk.
If there was a Muslim quota, would that make you feel more amenable to a more open immigration system?
“when this great country first welcomed your ancestors, was it a sacrifice? Was it charity? Were your parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents a burden on this country? Of course not.”
But aren’t things different now? When my ancestors arrived in the U.S., no welfare state existed from which they could seek such charity.
Sadly, there are millions of impoverished individuals in the world for whom the U.S. welfare system — including, food, housing, and medical benefits — would seem like the good life for them. Have we concluded that incentives no longer matter in predicting human behavior?
I don’t see this as an issue of demagoguery. I am pro-immigration. But the idea of “open borders” with a welfare system seems to present significant economic risk. If there were real-world precedents showing their fruitful co-existence, I’d be willing to reconsider.
As part of a family with German ancestry whose Great-Grandfather was forced to fight for the Kaiser against his wishes before he moved to America, I understand that part of the moral argument for open borders.
I also understand the economic argument, a bigger market is great for the economy.
But I cannot support open borders because it would allow terrorists into the country, and as an 8th grader at the time of 9/11 terrorism will always be a key issue with me. Despite the fact I know the odds of being killed by a terrorist are low and despite the fact I know about the availability hubristic... its a simple fact that this was a transformative event in my life and the lives of millions of others.
Does your book address this? I would not know because the description on Amazon is not very....well.... descriptive. I see no signaling from it that it addresses national security questions.
I'm sure it is great on the economics and moral arguments!
If it has something substantial on the national security topic my recommendation would be to update the description to include that and how much space is devoted to it (A whole chapter? A whole section?). If there is a 50% chance I could spent $12 and resolve my concerns on the national security front I would buy the book today. It would be nice to not have to worry about it.
I can't help but notice a large number of comments opining that open borders would mean the end of the welfare state. I would merely observe that, from Bryan Caplan's libertarian perspective (which is not my own), this is just threatening him with a good time. BC would see the crumbling of the welfare state as the cream on top of his open-borders sundae!
When my immigrant ancestors came to this country, mostly in the 19th century but some in the 18th, they had no reason to expect that they'd be sustained to any extent with subsidies provided at public expense. The deal was sink or swim -- and the prospect for successful swimming was a function of the presence and relative degree of such traits as intelligence, ingenuity, courage, charm, pertinacity, and moral rectitude. It's fair to assume that those in whom such traits were faint or absent were generally less inclined to uproot themselves from their native lands and social circles in order to take their chances in America -- and if some came here only to languish in poverty their presence imposed no involuntary financial burden on anyone else.
Matters are obviously quite different now. People who come here uninvited -- many of them from third-world countries where median population IQ is nearly, or more than, a full standard deviation below that of US citizens -- are housed, fed, transported, and provided with medical care and education at public expense, and any children they bear in the US will be eligible for the full-zoot of welfare-state benefits on offer for citizens. If we can no longer count on clear economic disincentives to weed out "takers" -- those whose total tax payments over the course of their remaining lifetimes would fall short of the total cost of subsidies provided to them at public expense over the same time span and to their children until they reach adulthood -- we should insist that effective screening to that purpose be implemented by immigration officials.
Maybe "Open the borders" is too extreme to realistically see any progress any time soon. Perhaps the message should be "repeal closed emigration" or "fix emigration" or "loosen the borders."
(a) welfare state, (b) the sheer scale, (c) one political party stands to gain almost all these newcomers as their voters, (d) related to b, the scale allows and encourages lack of assimilation, (e) terrorism, (f) look at western Europe, (g) there's more to a country than its economics, and (h) even at that, the free market system itself is not a given, (i) the culture of a country is a function of the people who live there - if we like our culture more than the culture of those coming... do the math.
Open borders for Israel.
Now what does Mr. Caplan have to say?
He already did the math and refuted all of those arguments in his book.
I'm one of the people not willing to take the time. I've yet to see a concise summary of how our culture could not be radically changed by a doubling or tripling of population from countries that don't share our core values. Nor explanations of practical implementation - how do we prevent an actual invasion? Can the Chinese government send people by the 10's or hundreds of millions with instructions to disrupt us and make our institutions subservient to the Chinese government?
You're not willing to read a very short graphic novel? I read Build, Baby, Build in a few hours.
I own all of Caplan's work and would argue I have seen almost every talk he has given that anyone took time to record. He has a blind spot to politics. For instance if you have a nation of one billion people it is a very small investment to send enough people to another country to completely change their political leadership and politics.
Bryan likes taking bets, I have a bet for him, he forms a company and puts any income he or his family makes into a shared trust that votes on how all funds are dispersed, then the allows anyone who wants to to simply join the company, contribute all their income into the company and get an even vote of how the money is dispersed.
Do you think Professor Caplan and his family would have a higher or lower quality of life after two years of this?
I bet $100 dollars he would end up having almost no money after 2 years. People without jobs would join the Caplan nation, vote to disperse themselves funds while adding no funds.
He can read all the statistics and bad studies done on this topic, but any attempt to create a testable situation will always end up with this not working out. If open borders worked and always paid off than every company should accept every employee who shows up and asks for a job because the company would just endlessly grow because there is a net benefit and no limit.
I love the way you keep citing culture. That is the blind spot of any libertarian promotion of open borders. (I'd forget about the China angle, though; that only appeals to conservatives)
Libertarians are literal morons.
I've never seen stupider people.
You think that's their blind spot? Their entire ideology is a blind spot. Ask them what they're doing to prevent anti-BDS laws from being passed. Or where they are on the "antisemitism" bills that are spreading, starting with South Dakota. These are explicitly against the First Amendment. They're not too loud when it comes to those things. Wonder why?
Not to mention they seem to think private property is the end all be all of life, and the Civil Rights Act has prevented PRIVATE BUSINESS OWNERS from discriminating based on race. Why shouldn't private businesses be able to discriminate based on any reason they want? That's been law since 1964. Where are they on that? Where are they when a business owner didn't want to accept a mentally ill man dressing like a woman to go to work? He went to the Supreme Court and won on that. Where were they then?
These people are worthless. They can defend child pornography for hours, and defend open borders for the goyim while Israel gets nothing but secure borders, and they think they're intellectuals. It's fucking pathetic. Caplan is the best example of this idiotic nonsense.
Does he want open borders for Israel?
As far as I am aware, no, actually. He's discussed exceptions before, and I think the situation in Israel is one of them. But that doesn't mean that they shouldn't have open borders with certain countries.
OH I SEE! Isn't that interesting?!
He thinks open borders are great for the goyim because reasons, but when it comes to something he actually cares about and wants to preserve, like his people's ethnostate, then it's an exception!
Well, isn't that remarkable! Certain countries should accept the third world human detritus, the crime especially sexual crime against women, the illiterate peasants, the strain on social services, the depressed wages, the benefit to the 1% who want cheap maids and gardeners, and the screams of racism (from primarily guess who--they have something in common with ol' Caplan here) from anyone who points this out, but Israel gets nothing but closed borders!
You people are worthless. Shut up. You can't stop people from noticing. It's too far gone.
No, he tried to refute them. I would love to see BC actually try to use his forum here to convince those of us who find his arguments shallow.
He's already written a book on it that isn't a long read. Why should he lay out all of his arguments again?
As far as your China scenario, it's far too outlandish and likely wouldn't work like that in the real world. The Chinese government isn't an ultra-competent ultra-rich supervillain able to force 10s of millions to do its bidding. How does it get them to follow its orders? Even then, the US can just ban immigrants from China and open the border to everyone else. Problem solved. This small and unlikely problem isn't worth a massive immigration bureaucracy.
what? I don't really understand your argument. None of these advanced data sets studied in an AC office at the union guaranteed job survive any obvious testing.
Lets say you live in State A and you actually like your culture and your way of life. In your State if you had say $50,000 that will fund a middle class life for 50 years.
You learn that State B, has free food banks, places to sleep for free, and if you go there and are willing to live a terrible life for 4 years you can easily make $50,000.
Do you feel bad that you will never pay into State Bs system that makes the charity and social benefits possible? Nope.
No more than people feel bad about it if they have a job they get paid well for even if they know they have no productive purpose at the job.
He hasn't looked at any of the studies on the amount of CASH that is flowing directly from high immigration areas back to home countries.
I didn’t mention China, but my comment was aimed at getting him to try to actually convince his own readers in an open dialogue. I am quite familiar with his arguments, and find them overly theoretical, idealistic, and less than convincing.
LOL WHOOPS SORRY
Open borders destroy a country and its economy, due to depressed wages and skyrocketing housing costs, not to mention the destruction of the native population's culture and population numbers. In the UK particularly they have a huge problem with Muslim rape gangs. It's happening in Sweden, the UK, Germany.
Mr. Caplan knows that. That's why he pushes it, and he has a personal reason for it because many of the people pushing for open borders for the goyim, while securing borders for Israel, are aware of what they're doing.
Everybody knows it. Just give it a rest.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/05/08/migration-failed-economic-growth-made-housing-crisis-worse/
He refutes it based on average studies and if you read a case against education you might learn there is a bit of a problem with a lot of studies, as you can basically form the study to get the results you want.
How do you refute for instance,
The immigration of Europeans dramatically changed the culture of the Americas. From my point of view it was a good change, but I think it is pretty well established that the native Americans saw it as a bad change.
Or lets look at a country that throughout it's history has a long standing track record of being against immigration.
Japan, I will not sit here and argue that Japan is dramatically better than any country, I would say they do pretty well. Generally better than U.S. in life expectancy, debt to income ratio, healthcare, education, crime and so on, but not some enormous difference.
So my point isn't that Japan is dramatically better, but if open borders and immigration is so incredibly beneficial why is Japan doing quite well. They are a country that is basically all native born citizens and close to completely of one race.
If we are to believe that diversity and immigration has enormous benefits, shouldn't we have left Japan in the dust?
Are Zenophobic countries actually performing worse? Sweden and Germany for instance?
Truth is Caplan is a really smart guy who can sometimes operate in a vacuum and makes assumptions about how quickly a country or politics can change. He assumes the trend will continue.
Basically ignoring distant history where massive immigration literally destroyed nations, not because the immigrants were bad, but because systems can collapse under too much change.
If all those things are a problem then regardless of immigration you need to find a solution, because millions of native-born Americans are "migrating" to bad politics all on their own. If you can't find a way to reverse that, then even if you stopped immigration entirely, native-born Americans with bad politics are going to do all those bad things anyway.
Only the "one party" thing is fully political. And despite the massive differences we see between parties, we still have near consensus in this country about some basics like rule of law, the value of markets, status of women, free speech and general enlightenment values (though I agree there is a disturbing trend on the far left away from many of these core values). If you consider the plight of western Europe in light if immigration from the middle east - there is little common ground and their immigration policy is pretty clearly suicidal to their western culture.
You can assert these things, but I'm going to need to see real data on the negative effects on western culture between immigrants and non-immigrants. Is Western Europe truly "in plight" as a result of this, in the way that is worse than say, native Marxist terrorist organizations from the 70s, conducting weekly bombings? Are their societies really committing suicide in a way that is dependent on immigration?
I am not arguing that there aren't negative effects, but I am gonna need to see some numbers - and those numbers need to highlight how the native-born citizens of those countries aren't ALSO believing and doing bad things too.
In every situation, "lots of people believe really stupid shit" is the real problem. When people try to fix that problem with "so we'll kick out all the immigrants who believe stupid shit" then I wonder, "what about all the native idiots?" If you don't also have a plan to persuade (or politically defang) the native idiots, who will happily impose (and literally, already have done so, before the immigrants arrived) all the bad consequences of believing stupid shit on your country, then what's the point? "Society has collapsed, but at least we have no immigrants!" And if you do have a plan to persuade people, then just deploy it against both natives and immigrants.
We need to assimilate people from the Land of Believing Stupid Shit into the Nation of Politics That Work, but that needs to be done to natives AND immigrants, because there are way more natives who are already here, believing stupid shit, and enshrining it in stupid laws and policies.
I'm not sure there's data to be had. You could attempt to look at GDP per capita or something, but I'm also talking about culture. Do you want to live in Afghanistan? Why not? Is it just because they are poor (I doubt it)? And why do you suppose they are poor anyway? Was it just thrust upon them by cruel fate, or is it more likely a function of the culture and attitudes of the people there? If you triple the population of Lichtenstein (or some random small wealthy European country) by importing people from Afghanistan, do you think that country would maintain its average standard of living? Would the people there be just as happy after all their institutions are taken over by former Afghans? I have no data to answer any of this, but most of the answer seem clear to me. I suspect the same is true for most others, and the onus is on the mass open immigration people to explain in clear terms why our intuition is false.
Is your argument that there are no significant cultural differences between countries and that if there are there is no arguably good or bad cultures. So if there were 1 billion Nazis you would be cool if 10% of them came to the United States making us 33% Nazis? There would be no danger there.
Do you not believe that people inherently carry their culture with them despite their intent?
Is it not possible that people fleeing failed states might actually be the people that made it a failed state? You believe they are fleeing the bad policies and thus would be open minded to our beliefs but what if in fact they are the ones who made the terrible policies that bankrupted the country and are now also the ones not willing to make the country better.
We basically can't compare the America and it's immigration of any time pre FDR to post FDR. Pre FDR if you chose to come to America you might literally starve, you would do anything to make a living and feed yourself. The America post FDR there is zero risk of starvation, zero risk of basically being forced into a coal mine, no chance you'll have to die on the way to your plot of land out west.
Now you would be leaving a much more risky situation to come to a much less risky situation.
That means you are not getting the innovators and risk takers necessarily.
> I'm going to need to see real data on the negative effects on western culture between immigrants and non-immigrants.
I'm not sure exactly how you might define "negative effects," and I don't want to spend all day chasing around the internet to find the specific kinds of evidence you may allow as showing something that any sensible person would regard as obvious, but here:
Howley, P., Waqas, M., Moro, M., Delaney, L., & Heron, T. (2020). It’s not all about the economy stupid! Immigration and subjective well-being in England. Work, Employment and Society, 34(5), 919-936.
"By exploiting spatial and temporal variation in the net-inflows of foreign-born individuals across local areas in England, we examine the relationship between immigration and natives’ subjective well-being as captured by the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ). We find small negative effects overall but that an analysis of main effects masks significant differences across sub-groups with relatively older individuals, those with below average household incomes, the unemployed and finally those without any formal educational qualifications experiencing much more substantive well-being losses than others. These observed well-being differentials are congruent with voting patterns evident in the recent UK referendum on EU membership. We put forward perceived as opposed to actual labour market competition and social identity as two potential explanations for the negative well-being impacts of immigration for natives."
In other words, immigration has a negative impact on the happiness of natives, which is most pronounced on the lower class. But in case you don't really care about the well being of the lower class we find plenty of other evidence that immigration is bad for culture. For example:
Lancee, B., & Dronkers, J. (2008, May). Ethnic diversity in neighborhoods and individual trust of immigrants and natives: A replication of Putnam (2007) in a West-European country. In international conference on theoretical perspectives on social cohesion and social capital, Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts, Brussels (pp. 77-103).
"With data from the Netherlands (N=5,757), using multi-level regression, we confirm Putnam’s claim and find that both for immigrants and native residents 1) neighborhoods’ ethnic diversity reduces individual trust in neighborhoods; 2) those with neighbors of a different ethnicity have less trust in neighborhoods and neighbors 3) a substantial part of the effect of neighborhoods’ ethnic diversity on individual trust can be explained by the higher propensity of having neighbors of a different ethnicity. We conclude that ethnic diversity can have a negative effect on individual trust."
Ultimately there's an enormous research stream on the subject, which is in some ways surprising. Given that immigration has been championed by the establishment for decades, now, there is an obvious bias against finding and reporting that immigration erodes trust and human happiness.
So it's a matter of indifference to you how many Islamists -- people impelled by a superstitious sense of obligation to do whatever they can to undermine constitutional democracy and promote establishment of Islamic theocracy and Sharia law instead -- take up residence in this country?
The solution is open borders for Israel.
What makes a normal person look at what happened to Sweden or France in the last 30 years and say: I want that too?
I completely agree, but I think it's fair to ask: is the immigration the problem or is it the way the government handled it (welfare to immigrants, not penalizing bad apples, etc)?
It's not a few bad apples. It's the destruction of the society by destroying its population.
Immigration, all of it from legal to illegal, is the problem. Open borders is the quickest way to destroy a society. That's why libertardians like Bryan Caplan oppose it for Israel.
I never said that. We probably both agree they would do a terrible job.
But that then means the problem is in fact the government, not immigration inherently.
And like this post suggests, there have been governments that handle immigration correctly, that's what we should aim for.
Because the same people who did what happened to Sweden and France are the same people who are doing it to the US. They have the same goal, and they all have something in common with Mr. Caplan here. You'll never guess what it is. Alejandro Mayorkas (hey wait a minute!) is presiding over an open border as we speak.
Ask if they want open borders for Israel. You'll be astonished by the inconsistency, truly!
No they don't. From what I've seen, immigrants to the US from Muslim countries aren't nearly as anti-Western as those to EU countries...
Schmaltz from Tamar Jacoby (or Bryan Caplan) being piped into their ears 24-7...?
No - more like, "I don't want to look like a Trump supporter."
The trouble is that the bigoted and irrational case against immigration is so loud; people are negatively suggestible by bad arguments, and don't want to be associated with anybody who makes them. In order for the majority to be *able* to believe something, it has to seem both educated and not mean.
I assume what you mean by "the bigoted and irrational case against immigration" is a bigoted and irrational argument for a more restrictive immigration policy -- since neither Donald Trump nor, AFAIK, any other prominent politician or widely-followed polemicist has advocated a complete ban on further immigration. But if that understanding is correct I'm not sure which restrictionist argument it is that you deem bigoted and irrational. Please elaborate.
It isn't that any policy is bigoted or irrational. It's that some people are more bigoted and irrational than others, and these people gravitate towards certain positions because of their intuitive, emotional reactions. Then moderates and leftists see them doing this, and start to associate the positions themselves with narrow-mindedness.
Yes but the historical eras of mass immigration also had much less in the way of transfer payments and government benefits. Immigrants who want to come here and work? Do landscaping? Open restaurants? Start businesses? Grand. Immigrants who are allowed in and given free housing and debit cards and food aid and plane tickets and healthcare? Not so grand.
American politics has changed a lot in the past two decades (never mind the past century) and the people who are often most pro-open borders are simultaneously often the people who want free college and single-payer healthcare and rent subsidies for all comers. You don't have to be Stephen Hawking to understand this will NOT work.
And somewhere around 1/3 of immigrants FAILED to thrive in the USA, tucked their tails between their legs, and returned to the old country. That's no longer the fate of failed immigrants...the USA owns (owes) them and their progeny forever.
While I agree with your general viewpoint, what does the data look like on immigrants and transfer payments? Given that the vast majority of transfer payments in this country go to old, retired citizens (who have been here for... quite some time indeed), I find it hard to blame immigrants for this problem.
You're ignoring who actually pays for mass immigration (hint: it's not primarily government).
Mass unskilled immigration causes depressed wage levels (see Borjas) and decreased opportunities for young and working class Americans to develop work habits and seek gainful employment (just look around you). Unless of course it's true that "there's work Americans just won't do" and "everyone should go to college or learn to code."
even Borjas' most compelling results only found like, a decrease in a few % points in wages, in a single labor sector. Yes, obviously labor competition exists and greater supply would lead to lower wages, but it's just not that big an effect.
"decreased opportunities for young and working class Americans to develop work habits and seek gainful employment (just look around you)."
It's fine to believe that but... wouldn't our recent periods of high immigration have resulted in high unemployment today? Do we have low employment or (non-inflation-based) wage stagnation? Are higher unemployment levels correlated with places that have had more immigration?
"You're ignoring who actually pays for mass immigration (hint: it's not primarily government)."
Okay, fine, but then I get to count the non-govt people also reap rewards from mass immigration, from renting apartments to them, employing them, selling things to them, or purchasing things created by their labor - but the guy I was responding to was complaining about transfer payments by the government. And if you're worried about the gov going broke giving money to people, it's the old non-immigrants that you are worried about.
I am fine with people arguing that immigration has costs that need to be accounted for in assessing if we need more or less, but if I'm going to be persuaded of a position, I need the arguments for it to make sense, otherwise I'm going to be anti-persuaded and support more immigration.
Immigrants get old and have kids too.
Sure, but on average, they do so less quickly, and in fewer numbers, than native-born who are already old and retired.
We all age at the same rate.
The case looks something like this. Low skill immigrant groups are flat to negative during their prime working years and strongly negative outside of them. They aren't saving anyones fiscal cliff.
https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/immigrations-fiscal-impact-denmark.png
It's not about blame. I'm saying that the policy calculus of immigration has changed from a country of free markets, stable jobs, and healthy communities to one of widespread public social spending. While most FEDERAL payments do indeed go to older Americans (citizens, mostly) that ignores the public policy WISHES of the people on the Left. Many Americans now want free healthcare and education for all residents. That is also something that has to be factored in to the immigration debate. If cities are going to publicly support waves of immigrants that is a factor that should be factored into the conversation. It was not the case in the 19th century-everyone made their own money and relied upon charity and family to fill the gaps. It is the case now, and all of those trends are moving in a consistent direction. I don't blame immigrants for wanting to come here and I don't blame voters who want open borders and free healthcare/housing/wage support of anything, except rank stupidity and a profound ignorance of policy realities and economics.
Sure, ok, but then we still have one problem: we currently have, regardless of immigration, unsustainable math re: workers vs transfer recipients. Sure, maybe a large influx of retired immigrants might make it worse, but we're talking accelerating the fiscal disaster by a few years. It is not reassuring to me that if we Stop Immigration, we destroy the country in 2042 instead of 2041. (And immigrants being mostly working age people likely means that effect isn't that strong)
You need to fix that one problem, whether or not you fix immigration. People focus negatively on immigration because it gets the politics blood pumping, but it's precisely for that reason that you have to focus on the actual, underlying problem. A fiscal disaster with immigrants is largely the same to me as a fiscal disaster without immigrants.
I'm not arguing that immigrants are going to break the bank. I'm saying that a societies with radically different forms of social support and employment and community will integrate newcomers differently. Just as Britain has had issues assimilating their immigrants because of ghettoization and religious extremism and public welfare, our domestic circumstances will change how we integrate immigrants. So far we seem quite good at assimilation but that could change if we become the society with free college and healthcare and rent support and high taxes that many progressives want us to be. In any case, the comparison that the author made between the millions of immigrants who arrived from 1700-1900 and the immigrants who are arriving now is imperfect. My reply was meant to point out why it was imperfect. It's not that immigrants will bankrupt us. It's that a country with low housing stock and a rigid labor market and high taxes and low business formation rates will NOT process newcomers in the way that 1900's New York City did. Those factors lead to more crime, more insularity, more social problems, and less assimilation. Identity politics certainly doesn't help either, in my opinion.
You seem to agree that someone born in America and someone born outside should have equal rights to get a job or start a business in America. So why do they not also have equal rights to receive American welfare? What makes the American-born recipient more deserving?
Overall your argument seems more anti-welfare than anti-immigration, except that you only apply your logic to immigrants and don't apply the same reasoning to people born in the USA.
In reality of course, some immigrants would live on welfare but most would get jobs, and the rich ones would subsidise the poor ones. A bit like how a welfare system already works, in fact.
Nobody has a right to a job or a business or welfare. I never mentioned rights at all, I don't think. I support a social system where people are free to start businesses and get jobs because I believe the public policy arguments are sound. In a utilitarian sense, an arrangement like that yields the most freedom and comfort and wealth.
Most people will only get jobs if the welfare system if appropriately sparse and minimal, and the welfare system only works if the economy is producing enough wealth to subsidize the recipients. That might be a given in a stable and rich economy with a standard demographic profile but probably wouldn't be at all times and in all places. Imagine a reunified Korean peninsula in 20 years with generous social supports. I think that situation would almost certainly tip their boat. It's an open question whether even our current outlays are going to 'work' long term, even though they're limited to certain age and income groups and usually only available to citizens.
In a country with generous rent support and food and childcare assistance most people will take advantage of those benefits, if they can.
I wasn't arguing for or against immigration. If you go back and read my reply you will see that.
If you don't believe they have a right to welfare anyway, why are you worried about them draining the welfare state? Just don't give them welfare.
Yes, I agree. Again: I wasn’t arguing against immigration. The fact that we HAVE welfare, and the fact that a large percentage of our voters want to dramatically expand the type and scope of our programs, should be included in conversations about the pros and cons of immigration. The nature of entitlement programs have changed and so have our cultural attitudes towards them and those changes will have implications for the way we integrate immigrants and the costs/benefits of admitting them. As I already wrote: if the people who WANT open immigration were also the people who generally favor limiting welfare our prospects would be better. But in many cases we have voters supporting effectively open borders while also promoting dramatic expansions of federal entitlement spending. Combining these two policy objectives would lead to problems.
Welfare State or Open Borders - choose one. Because our Welfare State is a political third rail and will remain with us for the remainder of the American Empire, then immigration should be restricted to those with the means to self-insure against dependency via bond, or else have an employer or sponsor (family or friend) post a dependency bond on their behalf.
the welfare state, even with just native-born Americans in the mix, is already a math nightmare over the next few decades. You assert "we have to pick one" but then immediately say that one cannot be unpicked. But if it truly can't, then we're screwed anyway. You'll still have roving bands of young people killing old people for voting for the 75% SS/M tax rates on them. But at least none of them will be immigrants.
I think excluding immigrants from the majority of transfer payments is a great idea, but the math of the welfare state in the US is that the vast majority of transfers go to old native-born people, [edit] and even without changing any law about "who gets transfer payments", immigrants would be eligible for far, far less than "retired Americans."
Immigrants vote for the left and the left is the biggest supporter for maintaining and expanding entitlements including old age entitlements.
Brian. Love you man, you do amazing work. Just in case you read the comments this time, you lost your opponents in the first sentence. My ancestors have never been immigrants. They were conquerors and colonizers, and no we don't want someone doing the same to us.
Immigrants moving from one place to another is the same as violently crushing a population?
Old fashioned conquerors like Cortez had to go to different countries and take over the people there. Modern-era conquerors made the process more efficient by having the conquered souls come to them.
What is shown in the post is the final result, the endgame, of high IQ and atheist intellectual thinking – the abstraction of everything until identity and uniqueness lose any significance. I call it: plasma destroyed the walls.
https://tamritz.substack.com/p/the-plasma-destroys-the-walls
Just came here to say: I am amazed that Bryan said "I wrote a book on this, which most people are unwilling to read. Here is the demagogic case I would make if I were a demagogue" and then people in the comments say "What? Where is the argument?" and "I am not reading his book!"
God help us all.
> Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration is my most persuasive book.
That's too bad, because I'm really not persuaded. I realize that as an economist you're vested in looking at things economically. But your argument glosses over the importance of shared culture and values. You've described homogeneous areas dismissively elsewhere:
"Who wants to go and move to a part of the country with almost no immigrants? Places like that are boring. Maybe not just because they lack immigrants, but a conspicuous fact about the low-immigration areas of the country is that they’re just dull places to be."
But the story of my life belies this perspective. I lost my childhood home to waves of immigrants, and have moved more than once to escape the dysfunction of polyglot cities. My recent move to a "dull" small town in New England with almost no immigrants was especially timely, as it came only briefly before a mass shooting tore through the city we had all too recently called home.
My experience is not unique; the state with the most immigrants is California, and Californians are fleeing the state even as immigrants move in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_exodus . Maybe they all have your attitude that "whatever, I'll just leave." But most human beings don't have a rootless consumerist belief that everything is fungible, including the idea of home. Most people value their communities - and a good thing when they do, because when people care about their community, they pull together and form a shared culture. But America is coming apart because of the loss of its culture, and libertarian solutions which continue to fragment and weaken that culture are not solutions at all: https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/is-libertarianism-a-bad-idea
well, at least we can't say that you didn't warn us that it would be demagogic; but demagoguery is never a good brief for uncontrolled immigration. This is 2024, not 1824 or 1924. Although, as far as that goes, the 1924 Immigration Act was the best immigration bill we ever had - and the 1965 Immigration & Nationality Act ,the worst. If we brought back the 1924 model, we could have a unified country again. Since 1965, American society has come unglued. Back to the future!
I see a number of comments regarding America's "culture". It seems to me that the United States truly is a melting pot of people from different parts of the world already. We've seemed to do alright merging all different kinds of people. Not perfectly, mind you. But, we've done it and our culture appears intact to me.
1. What do you see as America's culture?
2. If the US increases immigration, what will be destroyed? The NFL? Taylor Swift? The Museum of Modern Art? The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?
The second set of questions I have is based on the Welfare State.
1. Don't we have safeguards in place to prohibit people who aren't entitled to state benefits?
2. Why is it either immigration OR welfare state?
American culture is a subset of western culture: enlightenment ideals of individual rights, logic and rationality, rule of law, women and minority rights, broadly Christian with separation of church and state. More specifically American: freedom of speech, strong emphasis on individual rights, broadly libertarian by world standards, entrepreneurial spirit, rural/outdoor/gun culture and 2nd Amendment. That's off the top of my head. I'm sure I missed things.
You may or may not be aware how massively different people are from this outside the west. There are some good books on the topic, especially related to research in psychology where they made broad claims about human nature based on western college students.
So, from your perspective, America is a culture of freedom. You can fill in the blanks with whatever freedom that is (speech, religion, opportunity, travel). Certainly people from different parts of the world have lived in different situations and different cultural values. That's understood. But, it's safe to say that they want something that either can't, or won't be met in their current countries.
My question is why do so many fear a more open immigration system? It seems to me, if you are coming here, you are coming here for freedom of opportunity, choice, and individuality. We've absorbed many from dozens of cultures; Japanese, Chinese, El Salvadoran, Mexican, Polish, German...you name it!
Those who want to prevent any new immigration are those that feel that they are entitled to whatever it is they, and their families, have received from this country and that no one else should receive those opportunities. We have systems and processes in place to ensure that folks don't receive certain financial benefits without being a citizen; including voting, social security, welfare, and more. But, there is a pathway if someone is so motivated to join the American collective.
We continue to walk the path to a more perfect union...
"But, it's safe to say that they want something that either can't, or won't be met in their current countries." Most often material well being and/or physical safety. I suggest they most often don't care or have opposing opinions on issues such as free speech. I'll sarcastically point out the way liberals from California move away from there because of the liberal policies, then vote to bring them about in their new home. Now multiply this by a factor of 10 or 100 in the case of Muslim immigrants to Europe.
I don't fear a "more open" immigration system. I fear "open borders" or uncontrolled borders.
"It seems to me, if you are coming here, you are coming here for freedom of opportunity, choice, and individuality." I disagree completely. Muslim immigrants to Europe are not coming for those things. They are coming to escape the hell holes they were in before, but they still bring their culture with them, which is nearly 100% in opposition to all the freedom things I listed. Most people (just like the Californians) can't see that the policies they support are the root cause of the problems they are fleeing.
"Those who want to prevent any new immigration are those that feel that they are entitled to whatever it is they, and their families, have received from this country and that no one else should receive those opportunities." False. What is it about this country that makes it great? Is it in the water? It's in the broad culture: markets, individuality, freedom. Those things are "free" in the sense that any country could adopt them if they wanted to. The countries these people are fleeing did not adopt them and thus are languishing. But it's naive to think that every immigrant fleeing a hell hole sees this big picture and is moving *because* of freedom and markets. They are moving because their current place sucks and the new place is wealthy and safe.
Have you seen the riots and recent protests by Muslims (in their Burkas) in London? Do those people look like they are there to assimilate into the western mindset and culture?
NIMBY-ism is strong in California. Especially in the home market.
"I don't fear a "more open" immigration system. I fear "open borders" or uncontrolled borders.", then let's start opening the gates and not build more "wall". Build a wall around entitlements.
Some of the arguments you are making are if we can't ensure they'll assimilate, we shouldn't allow them in here. We can reduce the chances of Muslim protests, but we can't eliminate the chance. If it's a case of elimination of problems, or ensuring we only get good immigrants, you are not for a "more open immigration system". It sounds like it, but it's not. There is quite a bit of that argument in this thread already from the "I was in 8th grade on 9/11" folks. I was too, and it scared the beejesus out of me like everyone else...especially when I got a call that my daughters' daycare was being closed.
But we must have an understanding that in a free country there is always an element of risk involved. Driving a car is risk. Having too much to drink is a risk. Eating too much hydrogenated fats are a risk. Owning a house in a flood zone or a hurricane zone is a risk.
If there was a Muslim quota, would that make you feel more amenable to a more open immigration system?
“when this great country first welcomed your ancestors, was it a sacrifice? Was it charity? Were your parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents a burden on this country? Of course not.”
But aren’t things different now? When my ancestors arrived in the U.S., no welfare state existed from which they could seek such charity.
Sadly, there are millions of impoverished individuals in the world for whom the U.S. welfare system — including, food, housing, and medical benefits — would seem like the good life for them. Have we concluded that incentives no longer matter in predicting human behavior?
I don’t see this as an issue of demagoguery. I am pro-immigration. But the idea of “open borders” with a welfare system seems to present significant economic risk. If there were real-world precedents showing their fruitful co-existence, I’d be willing to reconsider.
As part of a family with German ancestry whose Great-Grandfather was forced to fight for the Kaiser against his wishes before he moved to America, I understand that part of the moral argument for open borders.
I also understand the economic argument, a bigger market is great for the economy.
But I cannot support open borders because it would allow terrorists into the country, and as an 8th grader at the time of 9/11 terrorism will always be a key issue with me. Despite the fact I know the odds of being killed by a terrorist are low and despite the fact I know about the availability hubristic... its a simple fact that this was a transformative event in my life and the lives of millions of others.
Does your book address this? I would not know because the description on Amazon is not very....well.... descriptive. I see no signaling from it that it addresses national security questions.
I'm sure it is great on the economics and moral arguments!
If it has something substantial on the national security topic my recommendation would be to update the description to include that and how much space is devoted to it (A whole chapter? A whole section?). If there is a 50% chance I could spent $12 and resolve my concerns on the national security front I would buy the book today. It would be nice to not have to worry about it.
He addresses terrorism there.
Bryan's book has some comments on national security. If you're interested in Caplan's argument against yours, check out Chapter 4.
Thank you, Marlon. That is great news.
I can't help but notice a large number of comments opining that open borders would mean the end of the welfare state. I would merely observe that, from Bryan Caplan's libertarian perspective (which is not my own), this is just threatening him with a good time. BC would see the crumbling of the welfare state as the cream on top of his open-borders sundae!
When my immigrant ancestors came to this country, mostly in the 19th century but some in the 18th, they had no reason to expect that they'd be sustained to any extent with subsidies provided at public expense. The deal was sink or swim -- and the prospect for successful swimming was a function of the presence and relative degree of such traits as intelligence, ingenuity, courage, charm, pertinacity, and moral rectitude. It's fair to assume that those in whom such traits were faint or absent were generally less inclined to uproot themselves from their native lands and social circles in order to take their chances in America -- and if some came here only to languish in poverty their presence imposed no involuntary financial burden on anyone else.
Matters are obviously quite different now. People who come here uninvited -- many of them from third-world countries where median population IQ is nearly, or more than, a full standard deviation below that of US citizens -- are housed, fed, transported, and provided with medical care and education at public expense, and any children they bear in the US will be eligible for the full-zoot of welfare-state benefits on offer for citizens. If we can no longer count on clear economic disincentives to weed out "takers" -- those whose total tax payments over the course of their remaining lifetimes would fall short of the total cost of subsidies provided to them at public expense over the same time span and to their children until they reach adulthood -- we should insist that effective screening to that purpose be implemented by immigration officials.
Maybe "Open the borders" is too extreme to realistically see any progress any time soon. Perhaps the message should be "repeal closed emigration" or "fix emigration" or "loosen the borders."
Open borders is what Alejandro Mayorkas has established right now.
He has something in common with Bryan Caplan.
My version of open borders: if you pass a background check and pay for the price of travel you can come to the U.S.
My version of open borders for Israel: no background checks and ADL pays for the travel
God Bless America! (And no place else)