Comment by jameshart | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jameshart | Hacker News Reader

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This is what’s called a ‘false dichotomy’

‘Open borders’ is a strawman, anyway. You can have policies which promote immigration, provide legal pathways for immigrants to provide labor to the economy (including unpaid labor like raising kids and domestic elder care), and can structure social benefits in such a way that you provide a social safety net, without having to just throw the border open to all or pay out unemployment benefits to anyone who shows up out of work.

Illegal immigration is a market response to a failure of the government to provide a legal framework for sufficient legal migration. People are willing to come to (for example) the US and work illegally without legal access to any social safety net. But allowing people to live under those conditions is both a moral failing (we should not be comfortable relying on the labor of people who face destitution if they lose their job) and a societal risk (people with no safety net are more likely to end up engaged in criminal activity that harms society).

So why not create a more structured arrangement? Create paths to legal immigration, with access to defined, limited, temporary benefits, and with a pathway that over time - as an immigrant’s stake in the country increases - converges towards the full security afforded to citizens.

>> Illegal immigration is a market response to a failure of the government to provide a legal framework for sufficient legal migration.

No, it really is not. There's really no upper limit on how many people might WANT to immigrate to your country (other than the obvious 8B world population size), but there's an upper limit on how many immigrants your country can accommodate in the given time frame. Increasing limits for legal immigration won't stop illegal one, it might even encourage it (e.g. when one person gets an immigrant visa and some of their relatives don't but they still decide do go, illegally)

If you make it possible for a large enough population of immigrants to be legally permitted to work, you create a situation where employers can remain within the law and only employ people who have legal right to work, meaning you can afford to actually enforce the law preventing employers from employing illegal workers (without as a side effect completely shutting down agriculture, construction and cleaning services across several states).

THAT reduces the incentive to enter the country outside the legal framework, since all the jobs are going to people who have the paperwork.

People do not want to go to live in places where they have no economic prospects.

Illegal immigration is the market response to different economic potential across countries. Just like in physics, if you have chemical potential differences across a boundary and particles can pass, you'll only reach equilibrium when the chemical potential equalizes.

Even if an immigrant enters a country and is still productive and doesn't even use any social benefits, he diluted the job pool. Those getting out of the job pool get the socialistic benefits. So the average productivity could still go down. Those immigrants compete with locals equally in the job market, so dividing them into one group having benefits and another without doesn't change the stability condition. So instead of an immigrant coming and taking benefits directly, he comes, replaces a working local which just takes benefits.

Open or closed borders are a real dichotomy from higher up viewpoint which analyzes dynamics and stability condition, not a 'false dichotomy'. They represent a constraint in the equilibrium condition, which either exists or doesn't. The most you can do is filter the demographics which can enter or leave. But you'll still reach an equilibrium for each demographic with an open border. Like diffusion through filtering membrane. Or you can restrict the flow, but it only delays reaching the equilibrium, doesn't change where that equilibrium will be.

These stability conditions and dynamics are forces beyond the power of governments. You can play around them and find a reasonable trade-off, or you can try fighting them and get disappointed.

It doesn't matter whether the immigrants don't get the benefits themselves, they compete for wages with people that do. It's funny you're even suggesting to solve this problem with inequality.

By the way, in Israel for example, the construction industry is completely dominated by Palestinians. They don't get any benefits. Israelis just don't work in construction anymore. Even when people are jobless they don't even consider working in construction because the state of employment just isn't worth it.

You can't solve this by creating inequality between immigrants and locals. It's even worse.

All immigration is the market response to different economic potential across countries. It will be illegal if no legal pathway for it is provided.

And: Did you just commit the lump of labor fallacy?

Why, in this model, are people ‘getting out of the job pool’ for these ‘socialistic’ benefits?

Benefits like.. healthcare that restores them to a state where they can return to work after an injury? Education that lets them develop skills to increase their productivity? Income support to allow them to care for a child, raising another generation of productive citizens?

I don’t understand why a society offering those benefits is automatically unable to also offer a structured immigration program.

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