"The main victims of the externalities, then, are property owners. Living right next to an airport typically depresses their property values by 5-15%, a major hit to their net worth."
This is only true for folks who bought before news of an airport in the vicinity, no?
It is not even true in many countries. In developing countries, an airport brings roads, infrastructure and some welcome state attention and property values typically shoot up.
I think we need to differentiate between different immigration streams:
1. High skilled, temporary
2. High skilled, permanent
3. Low skilled, temporary
4. Low skilled, permanent
5. Refugees
6. Illegal immigrants
Then calculate net externalities for each, instead of clumping everything together, over a 50 year time horizon to ensure we also calculate the costs of immigrants receiving Medicare and Social Security. Did anyone ever try to do this?
“Indeed, even if the immigrants across the street are crime-prone, they’re a blessing for locals as long as they’re less crime prone than the people they displace. But yes, some subsets of immigrants plausibly impose negative externalities on their local neighborhoods. ”
You keep repeating this claim that immigrants overall commit less crime than American citizens. But it’s almost certainly false or at minimum highly misleading, on two different levels.
First while I concur that legal immigrants commit less crime than citizens, even if it’s historically the case that illegal immigrants committed less crime than citizens prior to 2015, there is no good evidence suggesting this is still true, and plenty of evidence that it is false of the immigrants who arrived during the Biden Administration. Incentives matter, as you know.
Second, if you live in or next to high-crime inner cities, your above claim is almost certainly correct. But if you live in low or even moderate crime suburbs, it is probably not.
I.e. your claim only holds up when you average the very high crime in inner cities and perhaps a few rural areas across the whole country, rather than the *actual* crime of actual localities, which is what the rest of your piece does (or at least pretends to).
There are so many good arguments in favor of more legal immigration, including low-skill legal immigration, that you should stop continuing to make the bad arguments.
Speaking of externalities, in today's WSJ Louise Perry has an op-ed about the disproportionate number of rapes committed by asylum-seekers, particularly Afghan, in Britain:
"Yet the response is terrifyingly inadequate. While pink-colored leaflets with cartoon figures are being handed out to men apparently unaware that the rape of children is illegal, the government is busily engaged in housing these same men in taxpayer-funded facilities up and down the country. The residents of the tiny Oxfordshire village of Piddington have voted to secede from the U.K., in terror of the government’s plans to house 1,250 single, male, asylum seekers in a nearby military facility, from which they will be able to come and go as they please."
It is unfortunate that they did not make it to the U.S. Bryan would be welcoming them to his neighborhood with open arms!
Again -- zero mention of the welfare state enticing immigrants who only want the free room and board, medical care, schooling, and everything else that bums want; add to that ignoring their past criminal records, forgiving their new crimes "because they don't know the customs", and all the rest of it, including billions of dollars in fraud, licensed drivers who can't read or speak the language. Then there are the refugees flown in whose only desire was avoiding war, famine, and refugee camp squalor, and have zero interest in, and appreciation of, the new society they end up in, and in fact do everything they can to tear it down.
I do not believe this was a problem before roughly 1920, when there were no welfare benefits, no state sponsored refugees who hated their new location and society, and the new immigrants wanted to assimilate, wanted to fit in, and expected to have to work for a living without government handouts.
Stop coddling immigrants, stop flying in ungrateful refugees, deport the criminals, and bar them from all welfare until they become citizens. Then people might accept them as people who have earned a chance.
"Living right next to an airport typically depresses their property values by 5-15%, a major hit to their net worth."
As Spider Robinson pointed out in his novel Night of Power, if you like your home and just want to keep living there, you WANT your perceived property value to go down -- it reduces your property tax bill. So on that particular metric, it's house-flippers, not home-owners, who are hurt.
So in summary, in order to get more immigrants, which nobody wants, and raise house prices, which nobody wants, we should expropriate property owners, for the greater good?
I do love how Caplan is utterly consistent in his refusal to descend from his olympian, not to say ethereal, heights of abstraction, and never bothers to deal with humdrum facts.
"Low skilled immigrants" - wonderful phrase! So nice. Conjures up vision of hardscrabble migrants taking up lousy jobs to make a better future. Doesn't that just sound lovely?
Back on planet reality, we can see what "low skilled immigrants" means by looking at Ceuta. It is a vast number of idle young males who throw trash everywhere, demand social welfare and free housing and whose principle activity is abducting native girls for gang-rape.
Is there any realistic scenario - any _at all_ - in which these are not a net negative, not to say a complete disaster, for European countries?
> Half the people in my neighborhood are immigrants, and so is my wife, and only a hypersensitive bigot would find fault with them
Funny how he doesn't explain _what kind_ of immigrants those are. I invite Caplan to move to Les Banileus of Paris, and let his wife wander around uncovered. Let's see how long before she is given, shall we say, a vigorous experience of diversity.
Actually, living right next to an airport is NOT always bad - as pointed out by residents who live near one of the southern California GA airports, whose representative has been trying for years to get the little airport redeveloped. The local residents pointed out to a journalist who actually spoke to them that not only does the airport provide job and training opportunities, it also helps to prevent gentrification that they are well aware would cause them to have to relocate a considerable distance if it closed.
Your implicitly evil “gentrification”may well force renters to move.
Why would it force homeowners to move?!?
You real are claiming that increasing property values - most especially in the state of CA, which limits property insurance increases for existing property owners - is actively bad for… property owners?!?
For new airports (ie home owners bought there before there was an airport), would you then consider compensating them for their local negative externality, esp when society as a whole is earning a larger positive externality at the local home owners’ expense?
Then would you also support similarly doing so for areas that take in low-skill +\- illegal immigrants?
I think the airport to low skill immigrant analogy also falls down when you consider more than simply geography. The negative impact of airports decreases with distance from airport (unless you invoke thin-tailed events like plane crashes). But this is not the case with immigration (esp when you consider things beyond local petty crime). It is the societal effect, and not merely the neighborhood effect, that should impact discussion and policy.
Focusing on the airports: I think you are correctly comparing a negative externality (noise) against what is mostly the capitalized private benefit of flying, not a positive externality - i.e. the reason I am willing to pay more for my house is because I expect to use the airport. There are probably some positive externalities but analyzing those (agglomeration effects) frequently devolves into squishy claims where everything can be justified as causing agglomeration benefits.
> But yes, some subsets of immigrants plausibly impose negative externalities on their local neighborhoods. The demagogic response is to reduce immigration, or at least low-skilled immigration. The thoughtful response, however, is laissez-faire.
Aren't there enough people who want to immigrate without imposing negative externalities?
Libertarians make a great deal out of their property and that nobody has any right in whom they rent the property to and whom they employ on the property.
But they ignore the question of how their property is secured and defended against foreign invaders and domestic criminals.
Also, who enables and secures smooth transactions on which property depends.
The libertarian makes will and expects it would be honored and executed. Who does that honoring and executing? Who is supposed to pay for all these services the libertarian expects as a matter of course.
Hindu vegetarian culture subjects the meat business and customers to nonstop harassment, both petty and substantial. Meat shops are shut down for sacred days, even sacred months, get visited by unfriendly food inspectors, get their license cancelled for all sorts of reasons.
Now, import these vegetarian Hindus by planeload and see the same pattern whenever and wherever they get into significance voting population-wise. And a vegetarian Hindu is never more energetic than in harassing buying and selling of meat.
I'm not aware of that happening in the US. I think Garett Jones is right about the "culture transplant" broadly, but Hinduism with its rigid caste structure doesn't seem to transplant well.
Let's take a different approach. Rather than playing out hypotheticals in a freewheeling, unrestrained kind of ADS space of political possibility, let's ask the question for TODAY's policy environment. Let's use California.
Is more immigration a net positive when dependency is subsidized, housing markets are HIGHLY regulated, the bureaucracy uses their presence and needs to expand drastically, white candidates are actively discriminated against in employment and education, white (straight, male, etc.) contractors are actively discriminated against in government contracts, the criminal justice system maintains a low level de facto regime of anarcho-tyranny (ignoring systemic rule- and law-breaking by criminals and illegal aliens while strictly regulating and controlling law-abiding citizens)... oh, and illegal immigrants are allowed to vote in indeterminate numbers in elections (it's illegal, but it's still allowed in the sense that it happens and that state government has no appetite for identifying or resolving the issue)? Talk about the healthcare and education and hiring systems as they exist now, in California. Then ask yourself: more immigration, or less?
"The main victims of the externalities, then, are property owners. Living right next to an airport typically depresses their property values by 5-15%, a major hit to their net worth."
This is only true for folks who bought before news of an airport in the vicinity, no?
It is not even true in many countries. In developing countries, an airport brings roads, infrastructure and some welcome state attention and property values typically shoot up.
I think we need to differentiate between different immigration streams:
1. High skilled, temporary
2. High skilled, permanent
3. Low skilled, temporary
4. Low skilled, permanent
5. Refugees
6. Illegal immigrants
Then calculate net externalities for each, instead of clumping everything together, over a 50 year time horizon to ensure we also calculate the costs of immigrants receiving Medicare and Social Security. Did anyone ever try to do this?
My impression is no. We now have two political camps: a) any immigration is good b) there is no such thing as a good immigrant.
“Indeed, even if the immigrants across the street are crime-prone, they’re a blessing for locals as long as they’re less crime prone than the people they displace. But yes, some subsets of immigrants plausibly impose negative externalities on their local neighborhoods. ”
You keep repeating this claim that immigrants overall commit less crime than American citizens. But it’s almost certainly false or at minimum highly misleading, on two different levels.
First while I concur that legal immigrants commit less crime than citizens, even if it’s historically the case that illegal immigrants committed less crime than citizens prior to 2015, there is no good evidence suggesting this is still true, and plenty of evidence that it is false of the immigrants who arrived during the Biden Administration. Incentives matter, as you know.
Second, if you live in or next to high-crime inner cities, your above claim is almost certainly correct. But if you live in low or even moderate crime suburbs, it is probably not.
I.e. your claim only holds up when you average the very high crime in inner cities and perhaps a few rural areas across the whole country, rather than the *actual* crime of actual localities, which is what the rest of your piece does (or at least pretends to).
There are so many good arguments in favor of more legal immigration, including low-skill legal immigration, that you should stop continuing to make the bad arguments.
Speaking of externalities, in today's WSJ Louise Perry has an op-ed about the disproportionate number of rapes committed by asylum-seekers, particularly Afghan, in Britain:
"Yet the response is terrifyingly inadequate. While pink-colored leaflets with cartoon figures are being handed out to men apparently unaware that the rape of children is illegal, the government is busily engaged in housing these same men in taxpayer-funded facilities up and down the country. The residents of the tiny Oxfordshire village of Piddington have voted to secede from the U.K., in terror of the government’s plans to house 1,250 single, male, asylum seekers in a nearby military facility, from which they will be able to come and go as they please."
It is unfortunate that they did not make it to the U.S. Bryan would be welcoming them to his neighborhood with open arms!
Correction: to YOUR neighborhood, not HIS...
Again -- zero mention of the welfare state enticing immigrants who only want the free room and board, medical care, schooling, and everything else that bums want; add to that ignoring their past criminal records, forgiving their new crimes "because they don't know the customs", and all the rest of it, including billions of dollars in fraud, licensed drivers who can't read or speak the language. Then there are the refugees flown in whose only desire was avoiding war, famine, and refugee camp squalor, and have zero interest in, and appreciation of, the new society they end up in, and in fact do everything they can to tear it down.
I do not believe this was a problem before roughly 1920, when there were no welfare benefits, no state sponsored refugees who hated their new location and society, and the new immigrants wanted to assimilate, wanted to fit in, and expected to have to work for a living without government handouts.
Stop coddling immigrants, stop flying in ungrateful refugees, deport the criminals, and bar them from all welfare until they become citizens. Then people might accept them as people who have earned a chance.
"Living right next to an airport typically depresses their property values by 5-15%, a major hit to their net worth."
As Spider Robinson pointed out in his novel Night of Power, if you like your home and just want to keep living there, you WANT your perceived property value to go down -- it reduces your property tax bill. So on that particular metric, it's house-flippers, not home-owners, who are hurt.
So in summary, in order to get more immigrants, which nobody wants, and raise house prices, which nobody wants, we should expropriate property owners, for the greater good?
I do love how Caplan is utterly consistent in his refusal to descend from his olympian, not to say ethereal, heights of abstraction, and never bothers to deal with humdrum facts.
"Low skilled immigrants" - wonderful phrase! So nice. Conjures up vision of hardscrabble migrants taking up lousy jobs to make a better future. Doesn't that just sound lovely?
Back on planet reality, we can see what "low skilled immigrants" means by looking at Ceuta. It is a vast number of idle young males who throw trash everywhere, demand social welfare and free housing and whose principle activity is abducting native girls for gang-rape.
Is there any realistic scenario - any _at all_ - in which these are not a net negative, not to say a complete disaster, for European countries?
> Half the people in my neighborhood are immigrants, and so is my wife, and only a hypersensitive bigot would find fault with them
Funny how he doesn't explain _what kind_ of immigrants those are. I invite Caplan to move to Les Banileus of Paris, and let his wife wander around uncovered. Let's see how long before she is given, shall we say, a vigorous experience of diversity.
Actually, living right next to an airport is NOT always bad - as pointed out by residents who live near one of the southern California GA airports, whose representative has been trying for years to get the little airport redeveloped. The local residents pointed out to a journalist who actually spoke to them that not only does the airport provide job and training opportunities, it also helps to prevent gentrification that they are well aware would cause them to have to relocate a considerable distance if it closed.
Your implicitly evil “gentrification”may well force renters to move.
Why would it force homeowners to move?!?
You real are claiming that increasing property values - most especially in the state of CA, which limits property insurance increases for existing property owners - is actively bad for… property owners?!?
For new airports (ie home owners bought there before there was an airport), would you then consider compensating them for their local negative externality, esp when society as a whole is earning a larger positive externality at the local home owners’ expense?
Then would you also support similarly doing so for areas that take in low-skill +\- illegal immigrants?
I think the airport to low skill immigrant analogy also falls down when you consider more than simply geography. The negative impact of airports decreases with distance from airport (unless you invoke thin-tailed events like plane crashes). But this is not the case with immigration (esp when you consider things beyond local petty crime). It is the societal effect, and not merely the neighborhood effect, that should impact discussion and policy.
Do you think that recent events in Ceuta validate your hypothesis?
Don't bother him with facts
Focusing on the airports: I think you are correctly comparing a negative externality (noise) against what is mostly the capitalized private benefit of flying, not a positive externality - i.e. the reason I am willing to pay more for my house is because I expect to use the airport. There are probably some positive externalities but analyzing those (agglomeration effects) frequently devolves into squishy claims where everything can be justified as causing agglomeration benefits.
> But yes, some subsets of immigrants plausibly impose negative externalities on their local neighborhoods. The demagogic response is to reduce immigration, or at least low-skilled immigration. The thoughtful response, however, is laissez-faire.
Aren't there enough people who want to immigrate without imposing negative externalities?
Libertarians make a great deal out of their property and that nobody has any right in whom they rent the property to and whom they employ on the property.
But they ignore the question of how their property is secured and defended against foreign invaders and domestic criminals.
Also, who enables and secures smooth transactions on which property depends.
The libertarian makes will and expects it would be honored and executed. Who does that honoring and executing? Who is supposed to pay for all these services the libertarian expects as a matter of course.
Hindu vegetarian culture subjects the meat business and customers to nonstop harassment, both petty and substantial. Meat shops are shut down for sacred days, even sacred months, get visited by unfriendly food inspectors, get their license cancelled for all sorts of reasons.
Now, import these vegetarian Hindus by planeload and see the same pattern whenever and wherever they get into significance voting population-wise. And a vegetarian Hindu is never more energetic than in harassing buying and selling of meat.
I'm not aware of that happening in the US. I think Garett Jones is right about the "culture transplant" broadly, but Hinduism with its rigid caste structure doesn't seem to transplant well.
Let's take a different approach. Rather than playing out hypotheticals in a freewheeling, unrestrained kind of ADS space of political possibility, let's ask the question for TODAY's policy environment. Let's use California.
Is more immigration a net positive when dependency is subsidized, housing markets are HIGHLY regulated, the bureaucracy uses their presence and needs to expand drastically, white candidates are actively discriminated against in employment and education, white (straight, male, etc.) contractors are actively discriminated against in government contracts, the criminal justice system maintains a low level de facto regime of anarcho-tyranny (ignoring systemic rule- and law-breaking by criminals and illegal aliens while strictly regulating and controlling law-abiding citizens)... oh, and illegal immigrants are allowed to vote in indeterminate numbers in elections (it's illegal, but it's still allowed in the sense that it happens and that state government has no appetite for identifying or resolving the issue)? Talk about the healthcare and education and hiring systems as they exist now, in California. Then ask yourself: more immigration, or less?
I would LOVE to see you write about this Bryan.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/spencer-pratt-and-the-breaking-point