An argument for open global immigration
reprints.longform.org
reprints.longform.org
Poor countries are almost always poor because of the populations contained within--and if it's from some other cause, such as communism in China, then the resolution to poverty does not require migration, and in fact suggesting migration as a solution is plainly foolish in such cases.
Do you feel that it is the responsibility of rich people to help poor people generally, if they have a good reason to believe they have an effective way of doing so?
The fact that children in the well off countries benefit enormously from the work of previous generations is a very natural and positive fact. Unfortunately, the flip side of this is that other countries are plagued by the missteps of their previous generations. These are hardly questions of fairness, as a misstep could be having a weaker army in the face of an aggressor, but it is a fact of life.
Being an immigrant myself, I cherish the opportunity I have to make a better life for my family and work to make the most of it, but I will never dispute the right of the people of a given country to protect what their fathers and mothers have built for them.
Plenty of poor countries are plagued by the legacy of crimes committed against them by rich countries (and in some cases, ongoing exploitation today).
It's pretty glib to write that off as "oh well, natural state of affairs"
Arguably the greatest of the past empires, who probably fits your profile, is the British Empire. Look back far enough and Britain has been colonized itself several times. The populations there suffered.
Generations of those people worked to bring a better future and their descendants, as well as many others, enjoy the benefits of that work. Why should they not enjoy the fruits of that labor?
My own home is worse off because the cold war didn't go so well for them. Should I be bitter at the western capitalists for this or should I do what I can to build a better life? My personal view is that the latter is far more productive and is likely to result in better outcomes.
Is that a rhetorical question? Most people would agree it's unjust to punish children for the sins of their fathers, why is it any more just to reward children for the sins of their forefathers?
For a great part, "corruption" did a lot to ensure some countries would do poorly. For the effects of corruption, one need only look at Chile vs Brazil.
I think it's pretty clear economic policy in the last 70 to 80 years had the greatest impact on future growth progress and standing. Look at the standings in 1950. Looked pretty even. You have to remember in 1950 lots of Europe was way underdeveloped, aside from the UK, France and Germany. Less developed than some Latin American countries.
So, I don;t think there is a lot of correlation between history 100 to 200 years ago and their current situation. It's poor governing over the last 50 to 60 years or so.
[1]http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Economy/GDP-p...
That said, a number of countries seem to be missing. Also, looking at some other years, Austria in 1800s and 1950 are not the same country. I suspect same is true for many others. Still, very interesting data.
We're talking about a situation where people desperately want to get to Western countries, so much so that they risk their lives journeys of hundreds of miles over deserts on foot and oceans in shitty boats, and the Western states are employing thousands of people to keep them out.
This isn't "Take Ye Up The White Man's Burden," this is "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free"
The argument is that the fortunate has a moral obligation to help the unfortunate. It may be of religious origin (it's central in Christianity but probably also exists in Judaism and even earlier religions) or it may be just something that is a consequence of empathy.
Some people believe that people born handicapped should have to take care of themselves and that they shouldn't have to contribute anything (eg paying taxes) to their welfare, even if they die. Their lives is not their problem so why should they pay for something like handicapped children that they didn't cause?
I think you have a duty to help the less fortunate because that's the right thing to do, others may disagree. Scale the argument up, and fortunate countries have a duty to help less fortunate ones.
I generally agree, but only if they are willing and able as a culture/society to reform and help themselves.
ISTM that if you want a proper free market you have to allow free movement of both labor and capital. Willingness to work is what the poor have instead of capital, and it's their only option for accumulating some capital. Furthermore, if you have open immigration that means migrant labor is also free to leave during times of low demand because departure isn't necessarily a one-way ticket, which means that labor markets can be more flexible and responsive to economic conditions.
I am extremely distrustful of free market advocates who say that their principles suddenly shouldn't apply where labor is concerned. Last time we tried that inside the US, with towns posting signs telling economic migrants to keep going and using vagrancy laws to criminalize the poor, it didn't work out well for anyone. We shouldn't be looking to go back to that.
Really, we're approaching an era of increasing wage equalization as more and more of the world falls out of abject poverty, such that wealthy countries like the US may well face demographic problems from about 2030 onwards due to an inability to attract sufficient numbers of younger migrants to offset the fiscal costs of looking after retirees.
I refer you to this study from the Social Security Advisory board for a more in-depth explanation: http://www.ssab.gov/documents/immig_issue_brief_final_versio...
When people move to more affluent societies they tend to increase the pressure on natural resources. Imagine 7 billion people living first world lifestyles. I think it's unsustainable with current policies and technologies.
Living in the first world would first have to mean leaving leaner before it allows masses of people (billions) to move and consume greater amounts of resources.
Africa is the poorest continent on the planet. And one reason why so many countries there are in such bad shape is very well directly connected to the "White Man".
Are you aware of the damage European colonialism caused in the 19th century and how much of damage to socities, environment and economics in African countries was caused by US corporations enforcing political systems and establishments that would allow them to steal resources from those countries?
The Western countries do have a lot of direct and indirect responsibility for people suffering over there.
This is a weak argument. We do this for wealth in general: the mechanism is called inheritance. Of course, the author does not want to make this argument directly, because doing so would actually make the counterarguments more obvious, so the focus is instead based on emotion.
The second problem with the "free migration solves everything" hypothesis is that the wealth and health of a nation exist as a direct consequence of the existence of the barriers, both political and cultural, rather then some arbitrary geographic accident. Moving people from poor to rich nations does not do anything to help make the poor nations less poor; it only risks the problems coming over with the people.
It all depends on the rates, the degree of integration and the mentality of both the hosts and the immigrants. Some countries get this right, others fail miserably.
Also, personal anecdote, but out of the people I've met in Guatemala and expats in the US, essentially all of them recognize the US or Canada is way better and would prefer to live up North. The exceptions are the more better off, higher educated folks. And even then, it just takes a few reminders of the constant violence and insecurity to remind them and make them change their minds. <Generalization disclaimer>
Yes, they do. There are hundreds of billions of dollars every year being sent as remittances from those workers to their families in those poor countries.
Can you elaborate on what counterarguments you're thinking of that become "more obvious"?
There is a very nice example in Spain, there are two autonomous regions next to each other (there isn't any kind of border): Cantabria and the Basque Country[1], the former has a GDP per capita of 20,855 euros while the latter one 29,683euros. The same language is spoken in both [2], and the cultural diferences are minimal.
The reason while wealth of nation exists nobody knows, and nobody may ever know.
[1] http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anexo:Comunidades_y_ciudades_au... [2] While some government jobs may require being able to speak Basque, 2/3 of the Basque Country don't speak Basque, and there isn't any kind of discrimination.
It's also important to know that advantages and disadvantages carry over with time, so a place might be doing much better than another because of semi-arbitrary decisions over the years. Like why does Madrid do better than Toledo? Once the capital moves to Madrid, investment moves towards Madrid, and the one real reason they keep doing better it's this original investment, that brings people, which brings more investment.
Sometimes the differences aren't so arbitrary, but are down to bad bets. In the 1800s, Chicago bet on the power of Rail, St. Louis on the river. The river became less important, while rail became more important, so Chicago got way bigger.
As the article correctly points out, just more than a century ago in the United States, many people worried that HUGE rates of immigration from non-English-speaking countries would be dangerous to this country. They were wrong. Both my maternal grandparents were born in the United States, but their schooling was conducted entirely in the German language. My paternal grandmother was also born in the United States, and attended school only in English, but she attended church services in the Norwegian language and spoke Norwegian at home. Even the descendants of languages less closely cognate to English than those have grown up to be English-speakers just like me. This is not a problem. The strength of the United States (as the article points out) was established in the era when the United States had essentially no restrictions on immigration. I wouldn't mind bringing back those days. If other countries didn't try the same policy, the United States would just grow faster at their expense.
[1] http://www.cnbc.com/id/48686889
[2] http://articles.latimes.com/2003/jun/15/news/adfg-brides15
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023041980045751712...
Furthermore, I would argue that the modern US government was _invented_ during the era of closed borders. Consider the New Deal's various incarnations, Social Security, robust regulation of business, the Wagner Act, etc. Continuing on to post war managerialism. Libertarians may want Guilded Age business policy and immigration policy, but a lot of people just want to cherry pick the immigration policy.
So, in an open border society, it would make no sense to pay taxes because they wouldn't give you as a tax payer anything.
For this reason, global corporations who want zero tax rates and the supply of the entire world's population to hire from and effectively pay slave wages, and these "progressives" are united in their wish to dismantle the welfare state.
http://www.ibtimes.com/south-africa-xenophobic-attacks-2015-...
How exactly Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Nigerian and Chinese shopkeepers provide rare skills is a mystery, and it is very hard to justify the presence of unskilled labour from countries like Malawi in South Africa, which has 25% unemployment. There are also many Somali "refugees" who manage to bypass 3 countries in East Africa and end up in South Africa, where they also open up small businessss.
Of course, anyone who asks these questions in South Africa is labelled a "xenophobe" by the media.
Also, I find at least one factual howler in the article: the claim that South Africa after the end of apartheid has been a stable country.
It's hard to make a logical argument that immigration controls exist purely for economic reasons; social services and weather apart, Sweden (or the UK or Canada) and the US have comparable standards of living and levels of English proficiency. None of the arguments against allowing unchecked immigration from poor countries to rich (education, overwhelming public services, falling wages etc) apply in this scenario and yet (again, apart from the EU), open immigration between roughly equally developed countries doesn't exist.
There's another issue that makes open global immigration more attractive to wealthy nations. Free investment and trade move jobs to nations with competent workers who demand less pay, leaving behind industrial decline and unemployment. Open global immigration would ameliorate that.
There are ways to help poor third world countries: 1) focus on ameliorating eradicating the worst forms of preventable suffering. Bill Gates is doing this. Improve childhood nutrition to reduce stunting. 2) Trade with them. While Europe and the U.S. were bailing out their banks, South African corporations have been getting rich selling satellite TV, cellphone services and introducing chain supermarkets to Africans. You see, they want the same things that the rest of us have. Invest in their countries and make a profit. That will help them in the medium-long term.
However, on a population wide basis, it is a different story. The article uses refugees and oppressive governments (exceptions to the rule) in order to make his argument. A tactic I distrust. He does make a good point about the EU, although I think the jury is still out on that one.
I believe we should have more immigration in the US. However, we limit immigration for a reason. And the reason is too many people at once burden the infrastructure. We can only build so many freeways, schools, and hospitals at once. So, a large influx of immigrants will cause traffic, crowded classrooms, and long waits in the emergency rooms. Anyone who lives in LA can tell you this is the case since California has had a rapid population primarily driven by immigrants.
Instead of short-term fixes (which include distributing food, clothes, etc.) I would hope that Western countries would actually help build up the infrastructure in these poor countries, and let them run their own affairs.
And, for the sake of all that's good and holy, stop propping up dictators all across the world, if that means our gas is $0.05 cheaper or our phones are $.25 cheaper.
To me, open borders are an obvious thing to strive for.
The only reason not to have them is as a sort of hack to hold together systems that are going to fall apart eventually anyway (e.g. welfare systems that treat people differently based on a bit of land they were born on).
It really seems to me that the only argument against is basically 'I deserve my wealth'.
Can people not see how ridiculous the current scenario is? Westerners are basically superhumans, welcome almost anywhere, with a bunch of money that allows them to basically go colonial if they decide to leave.
Just be honest with yourself. You can be hypocritical and vote against it whilst accepting that it makes sense.
Similar example: meat production, especially battery hens etc. It is mind blowingly obviously a cruel and bad thing to do. You can accept that and still eat meat. You don't have to lie to yourself and others and pretend that you have a 'different opinion' or whatever.
I use and buy leather. I know that it is not morally a nice thing to do. But I am human, I have vices, I am imperfect. What I refuse to do is somehow pretend that it makes sense or is kind or rational or should be done.
I wonder if there is some way to use this as a way to ease some immigration laws.
But, NYC breaks down if another 8 million people move into it. San Francisco is 1/10th the size of NYC and it already can't handle the people it has.
The only way fully open and accepted and world-wide immigration works is under unconscionable "living area restriction" schemes limiting already overly-popular areas. You either pick an "open" area (Idaho! North Dakota!) or slot new people into some pre-allocated catchment areas/states with restricted residency/transit for the first 5-15 years of their relocation? But, that sounds a bit too ghettoy.
China can build new cities in the blink of an eye, even if some of them end up going completely unused. The US can't maintain the cities it has and spends $30 billion to dig a new 2 mile subway ($5 billion towards cost, $25 billion towards corruption). There are solutions to "everybody wants to live in a better place" problems, but it takes organization, time, resources, a vision for a better future, and generosity. The world isn't currently offering those as a packaged deal. Be 70s forward-thinking-by-30-years-ahead California, not 2010s only-plan-for-6-months-later California.
But, that's assuming "aspirational" immigration where 30 million to 300 million people would want to move "to the west" for a chance at a better life. What about "i got mine, i just want to move" immigration? NYC<->London? Sydney<->Chicago? Something between an educated worker visa and an investor visa? We don't have an answer for that. You are just incidental to a combination of where you were born and where your parents had citizenship at the time you started breathing outside the womb.
Or if you want a daily dose of extreme left-wing nonsense, subscribe to The Guardian or your country's equivalent.
What part of this argument do you disagree with, and why?
Anyway, the other far more obvious solution is to move manufacturing to war torn areas. A billion dollars can creat a lot of jobs, and with reinvestment things can quickly snowball. Sure, setting up sweat shops is not going to give you the same kind of feel good boost, but poverty breeds corruption which breeds poverty.
From the point of view of the Native Americans, that's roughly what happened already. Only thing different is language this time around, not that all of the original immigrants into America spoke English, and not that all of the current people there do.